AMD's latest blog post on gaming graphics is doubling down on the importance of plenty of VRAM for modern gaming, pitching 12GB-plus as optimal for 1440p gaming. The only slight problem is that the GPUs AMD is pitching in the 1440p space are essentially over two years old at this point.
In a blog post titled the "Importance of VRAM when gaming at 1440p in 2023", AMD's Matthew Hummel says the latest Steam survey data shows that 1440p is the sweet spot for PC gaming. And AMD recommends 12GB of VRAM for 1440p gaming at maximum settings.
The blog post has various benchmark examples showing AMD's 12GB Radeon RX 6750 XT tearing Nvidia's 8GB RTX 4060 Ti a new one in games running at max texture detail and with ray tracing enabled. The latter is arguably the great irony in all this—that Nvidia's usual ray tracing advantage is reversed on low-VRAM RTX boards because enabling it can push VRAM usage beyond the available buffer. And that can really hurt performance.
Of course, the caveat here is that simply running a game at maximum settings usually doesn't make sense. Typically, the very highest settings hobble performance horribly while not significantly improving visual quality over knocking things a notch down.
So, you could argue AMD's benchmarks are somewhat contrived. On the other hand, there is also real value in being able to simply hit global maximum settings and be pretty confident that you're not going to run out of VRAM.
The other snag with AMD's implied—and not so implied—criticism of Nvidia is that at least the latter has launched its latest 1440p contenders in the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti. The cards AMD pitches as its 1440p offerings, the RX 6700 XT and RX 6750 XT are now very old.
We are expecting AMD to roll out
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