I’ve seen claims that the VRAM usage in many game engine’s overhead is high enough that the VRAM in GPUs of cards like the Titan series like 12GB is extremely useful for game developers.
I initially think this wouldn’t be a big issue and Something like a 1080Ti with 8GB is more than enough for game development and a game hitting that high of vram would obviously have some implementation problems.
Wanted to seek multiple opinions. How much VRAM is enough? Is 12 actually useful at all for game development? Overkill?
Having a lot isn’t going to benefit much, 4GB should be fine for development.
In UE4 it’s helpful to have a lot of RAM for building lighting–all of the assets (geometry and textures) have to be loaded into memory to render the lighting so if you have a large level it can use up a ton of RAM. But that is not affected by the GPU in any way. Memory usage isn’t as big of an issue but things are still designed to optimize VRAM usage so the minimum VRAM is going to be pretty low.
There are other programs that benefit from it though, like GPU renderers (iRay, VrayRT, Redshift, Octate) they do render on the GPU and benefit from having more VRAM.
Darthviper107, vram=/=ram. There is a very large functional difference between the two. 4GB of regular ram is not recommended for development at all. Windows 10, alone, will eat up a GB or more; leaving you with 3gb or so to work with. For example: I’m sitting here with one Chrome tab open and pretty much nothing else, ram usage is at 2.1/11.9gb for me. Assuming that you’re working on a current generation game, I’d recommend at least 8gb, if not 16gb; for development. Especially if you plan on having static lighting for levels. It also helps a lot of when you’ve got a ton of programs open like UE, Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop, Substance, browser, etc.
Now for VRAM, I’d say that you’d want to have at least 20-30% more than what your target hardware is going to have; due to the overhead of the editor+any other programs open that use VRAM (Even Photoshop can use VRAM). The reason I’m saying that you’ll want more is so that you don’t have to close everything out for standalone testing. If 3/8gb of VRAM are tied up in other programs and your actual standalone game is designed around having 8gb of VRAM; you’ll probably run into a lot of stream hitching issues.