Are 8GB Graphics Cards Enough For PC Gaming? AMD Weighs In
AMD's head gaming honcho Frank Azor has elected to address the original complaint on Xwitter:
We can find some fault with Azor's argument, but he is not off the mark. The Radeon RX 9060 XT is a powerful GPU, and if you're buying it to play League of Legends or Valorant, you're arguably wasting your money because you don't need any graphics card at all to play those games in 1080p, even on high settings with good frame rates. We didn't really cover e-sports games, but the vast majority of them are not nearly as demanding as the tougher things that we did cover in our deep dive on gaming with integrated graphics that went up recently, like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk 2077.
To give you a little peek behind the curtain, when we've done graphics benchmarks, we've sometimes selected games that we know will tease out differences in the products we're testing. That's one reason that we like Doom Eternal as a benchmark, because it will gleefully exceed 8GB of video RAM on its highest settings. As you can see, the 8GB cards suffer here due to their limited video RAM. But all you have to do to smooth out the experience is to simply drop settings down a couple of notches from Ultra Nightmare. The game doesn't look meaningfully worse and it certainly doesn't lock you out of extra levels or weapons for doing so.
Our colleagues over at Hardware Unboxed quote-tweeted Frank's response remarking that 8GB versions of GPUs exist "for system integrators to milk customers," and accuse AMD and NVIDIA of "misleading" gamers by using the same names for cards with different specifications. In some cases this criticism does ring true, like when NVIDIA was selling no less than five different version of the GTX 1060 with little to no changes in the naming convention to differentiate the products.
For our part, we don't really think that's a fair judgment against AMD in this specific case because the two version of the Radeon RX 9060 XT are identical in every way except for their local memory allotment. As such, if you're not limited by video RAM, performance should be identical. It does require a little more attentiveness from the consumer to make sure they're getting what they expect, but that would be true if the model number was "Radeon RX 9060" as well. Specifically calling out the video RAM capacity makes it clearer and more explicit.
Azor is right when he says that there is a market for 8GB graphics cards, though, and the market is for gamers who want a current-generation discrete graphics card with all of the latest feature support, but don't care about playing the latest games on the absolute highest image quality settings. The reality is that an 8GB GPU will run games like Doom: The Dark Ages and Monster Hunter Wilds without a problem. You just have to compromise a little on the settings—and your ego.
