How do I benefit from more VRAM in unreal engine development

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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I am going to buy one of those upcoming RTX3000 series cards. Most likely the RTX3080. I always use the latest nvidia xx80 model and just sold my old RTX2080 in order to upgrade.

According to all the rumors, the RTX3090 will most likely get 24GB GDDR6X with up 21Gbps and the RTX3080 will get 10GB GDDR6X with up to 19Gbps (seems like Micron kinda confirmed that).

I most likely will go with the RTX 3080 since this will absolutely be enough for all my 1440p gaming needs. But out of curiosity, how and in what ways would my hobby unreal engine game development benefit from the addtional VRAM size and speed (not asking about the pure additional GPU processing power, only interested in the VRAM difference). This would be most likely a $500 premium over the RTX3080 so I need to know how much benefit it would actually offer. As long I don’t switch to 4k gaming there wouldn’t be gaming benefits.

Thanks.

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A bit off topic, but:

I always upgrade to top card ( TI series, titan is overkill imo.). Last time i got new card it was 980TI. Around same time my friend bought some bit above budget ati card. Since then he upgraded it 3 times. Every time to something with best power for bucks. But in those years he spent on graphics cards as much i did, only difference i done it in one time purchase.

For gaming you dont need top graphics cards. But for development it is nice to do it all faster (and as fast as possible). That late night “one more build” and test on fast hardware can save you much needed sleep.

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thanks for the response, but I am mainly asking for the benefits of more VRAM, not actual processing speed. So, what would be the benefit of havin 24GB VRAM vs 10GB VRAM in regard to Unreal Engine game development.

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You should wait and check AMD’s new VGA’s, coming out at end of year maybe early new year.
The Top O line ones are gonna have raytracing and possibly faster, probably a lot cheaper too… thats what I’m waiting for !!

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Thank you, but I already sold my old video card and I can’t wait until November when they will start selling. Also, after following the rumor mill quite a bit it is highly doubtful that AMD will compete with th RTX3090. It’s kinda confirmed that their high-end model will only compete with the RTX3080. They might not be much cheaper then Nvidia, especially since the AMD top model is rumored to have 16GB vram which will cost extra chunk of money. So, expect the top AMD card in November to have about the same performance as the RTX 3080 when it comes to processing, with 6GB more VRAM. Question will be if it will be GDDR6 or GDDR6X. If they have GDDR6X the cards would be probably more like $1000. Unless AMD is planning to sell them with a loss…

Also, again, the questions is not about what card to buy and not to buy. It’s only about the benefits of additional VRAM in regard to Unreal Engine game development. no other questions asked!

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For VRAM you benefit more when rendering at high resolutions and it also fills up with assets like geometry and textures

Depending on what you’re doing it can also be used directly for rendering–there’s a GPU Lightmass renderer for UE4 right now where it will render your baked lighting nicely but requires you to be able to load the entire map into VRAM which can be a challenge for most people. If you’re doing GPU rendering in other software, like say you’re using a GPU renderer in 3ds Max then it has the same requirement that all assets in the scene have to be loaded into VRAM for it to be able to utilize the GPU for rendering.

For a game engine, once stuff is baked it only needs to load what it needs into VRAM, but that can go up quite a bit with how much content games these days have. Some games even have HD texture packs available on PC.

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