It depends on your definition of “usually”, high end GPUs for data centers, AI, workstations or “enthusiasts” yea. For these applications you’re starting at like 16
It’s also fairly cheap to buy 32+ GB of RAM, lots of choices for under $80. Meanwhile, I’m not even sure how you find a video card with 32GB of VRAM (not that you really need this much, 12GB and 16GB are pretty solid for a video card nowadays).
8gb of VRAM is still pretty good, but 8GB of RAM is getting pretty low these days. 16GB of ram and 6-8 VRAM is pretty common, and even that might go up relatively soon.
If you have an 8GB GPU that’s a few years old, it’s probably doing okay-ish. It probably doesn’t have the performance to really suffer from VRAM limits and you don’t game with things like raytracing or ultra detail settings turned on because the GPU isn’t fast enough for those things anyway.
My Vega 64 had 8GB VRAM and that was fine.
If you buy one of the new GPUs with 8GB though, the VRAM is a huge problem. You have the GPU power to have all the features turned on, but you’re going to see real performance crippled because it overflows VRAM.
Longevity is the other issue - when games released in 2025 run like ass on your 8GB GPU from 2017, you won’t be surprised. Bad performance from an 8GB GPU that released in 2025 for $500, that’s a problem.
Creating your swap as 2x your RAM is outdated advice. Now it’s essentially changed to be 2x until 4GB of RAM, then 1x until 8GB, and anything over 8GB just use 4GB of swap because you probably have enough RAM. Or, even some modern systems like Fedora will swap to zRAM. Which is just a highly compressed portion of RAM.
I think that recommendation came partly due to hibernation, where the ram is dumped to disk before powering off. Today, I’d probably use a swapfile instead.
Normally you don’t even have that much virtual ram. It’s at most twice your system ram, but honestly past 8gb and you’re gonna want to start closing out of stuff.
Isn’t vram usually bigger than ram? Those pics should be switched.
EDIT: Oh, I took vram to be virtual ram, not video ram. It makes sense for video ram.
Mine certainly isn’t. 6GB vram, 16gb ram.
It depends on your definition of “usually”, high end GPUs for data centers, AI, workstations or “enthusiasts” yea. For these applications you’re starting at like 16
GPUs for us plebs, no
It’s also fairly cheap to buy 32+ GB of RAM, lots of choices for under $80. Meanwhile, I’m not even sure how you find a video card with 32GB of VRAM (not that you really need this much, 12GB and 16GB are pretty solid for a video card nowadays).
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/rtx-a6000/
48GB, so not enough. I want the A100 80GB.
https://www.horizoniq.com/blog/nvidia-a100-specs/
8gb of VRAM is still pretty good, but 8GB of RAM is getting pretty low these days. 16GB of ram and 6-8 VRAM is pretty common, and even that might go up relatively soon.
If you have an 8GB GPU that’s a few years old, it’s probably doing okay-ish. It probably doesn’t have the performance to really suffer from VRAM limits and you don’t game with things like raytracing or ultra detail settings turned on because the GPU isn’t fast enough for those things anyway.
My Vega 64 had 8GB VRAM and that was fine.
If you buy one of the new GPUs with 8GB though, the VRAM is a huge problem. You have the GPU power to have all the features turned on, but you’re going to see real performance crippled because it overflows VRAM.
Longevity is the other issue - when games released in 2025 run like ass on your 8GB GPU from 2017, you won’t be surprised. Bad performance from an 8GB GPU that released in 2025 for $500, that’s a problem.
Creating your swap as 2x your RAM is outdated advice. Now it’s essentially changed to be 2x until 4GB of RAM, then 1x until 8GB, and anything over 8GB just use 4GB of swap because you probably have enough RAM. Or, even some modern systems like Fedora will swap to zRAM. Which is just a highly compressed portion of RAM.
I think that recommendation came partly due to hibernation, where the ram is dumped to disk before powering off. Today, I’d probably use a swapfile instead.
Swap files are just a file version of the swap partition. I need a 24GB swap file to hibernate.
Normally you don’t even have that much virtual ram. It’s at most twice your system ram, but honestly past 8gb and you’re gonna want to start closing out of stuff.