I noticed in the transition from UE4 to UE5 that in almost identical use case scenarios UE5 eats VRAM a lot more aggresively.
I can’t speak to why this is but there a lot of people complaining that 8GB VRAM is starting to be too low for next gen AAA games, and I can certainly say it is no longer enough for any sort of intensive dev work unless you’re willing to spend a large amount of time on optimisation.
I bit the bullet and got a 3090 with 24GB VRAM and it was well worth the cost. I work with extremely large arch viz assets such as Revit masterplans, and I was finding the 20GB VRAM in my A4500 wasn’t enough for some particularly demanding scenes I have.
Bottom line is Unreal these days eats VRAM and it’s only going to get worse as time goes on