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3060ti 8gb vs 3060 12gb

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Identical situation awaits you if you buy a card today that has 8GB of video memory. I think everyone who reccomend 3060ti with 8GB is really short sighted and completely missed the point that you are asking for a card that will have enough VRAM for new games 4 years from now. You will find yourself in a situation where developers reccomend 10-12GB of VRAM with RDNA 3 and RTX 4000 series cards on the market, you will have RTX 3060 Ti that gives slightly better fps and then you must lower textures to medium, and the game just looks bad. While on RTX 3060 you can simply lower the quality of shadows, ambient occlusion and some other barely noticable things for example and get the same fps but with high quality textures. And in the end better looking game. While lower quality textures are quite noticable and have big impact on how the game looks overall.

That might have some validity if OP were buying a 3090 or 6900XT. 8GB is more than enough for what a 3060 or 3060 Ti can do. 12GB is just there on the 3060 for marketing purposes. No sane developer is going to target 12GB GPUs for multiple obvious reasons, and there's no reason to think that they will for the next 4-5 years.
 
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3060 Ti. GPU power is power. While vRAM can be managed by lowering texture details.

 

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That might have some validity if OP were buying a 3090 or 6900XT. 8GB is more than enough for what a 3060 or 3060 Ti can do. 12GB is just there on the 3060 for marketing purposes. No sane developer is going to target 12GB GPUs for multiple obvious reasons, and there's no reason to think that they will for the next 4-5 years.
No reason to think that they won't. Especially for the latest games. And especially since AMD is more generous with VRAM. I also have a system with RX 570 4GB. Suprisingly capable 1080P card held back in some games by 4GB of VRAM.

As for bandwith difference on RTX 3060 vs 3060Ti....3060 has 12GB of GDDR6 running at 1875MHt over 192bit bus. 3060Ti has 8GB of GDDR6 running at 1750MHz over 256Bit bus.

So 3060 bandwidth = 360gbps
3060Ti bandwidth = 448gbps

And you can lower that difference by OC-ing the VRAM. According to TPU review you can OC it to 2200MHz which would come to 422Gbps on RTX 3060.
You can OC VRAM on RTX 3060 Ti with liquid Nitrogen if you want. It won't go over 8GB of total memory if the game requires more for max textures.

Or you can always download more VRAM or RAM from the internet. :laugh:

Best solution would be to go for RX 6700 with 12GB of VRAM and more or less better performance than 3060Ti
 
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The main reason I ask is in 2013, I once purchased a 770 2GB instead of the 4GB because I was told the card wasn't really fast enough to matter.

You were told right, what did the 4GB version do better? Offer 10-20% performance boost in a few cherry pick games three to four years down the road? So instead of getting a stuttering mess of 25 FPS you got a smooth experience at 28 FPS? Both versions were due for an update at the same time.
 
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6GB isn't the problem per se w/ those, rather 6GB GDDR5 is. As you can see, the 2060 w/ 6GB of GDDR6 is doing just fine. Bandwidth matters. And the 3060's starved on that, compared to the 3060Ti.

Yes. Im not contesting that. Rather you could say its the combination of bandwidth and capacity. But for its bandwidth and its capacity, the 3060ti has 'too much' core.
 
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3060. VRAM is VRAM. No ammount of horsepower or overcloking will fix lack of VRAM. If you are trying to build something more futureproof, I would go with RTX 3060. Not much difference in horsepower, especially if you OC your 3060, but once you get to a game that uses more than 8GB of VRAM for max textures, you will be happy with 3060. On the other side, you will have 3060Ti that gives you more fps, but you have to lower texture quality so much that the game looks like crap.
Yup, all my games that fit their textures in to 8 GB of vRAM look like crap. /s
 
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To respond on the same tone you used.:
3060. VRAM is VRAM. No ammount of horsepower or overcloking will fix lack of VRAM. If you are trying to build something more futureproof, I would go with RTX 3060. Not much difference in horsepower, especially if you OC your 3060, but once you get to a game that uses more than 8GB of VRAM for max textures, you will be happy with 3060. On the other side, you will have 3060Ti that gives you more fps, but you have to lower texture quality so much that the game looks like crap.
Do you remember writing this ? Please show us a game that fits it's textures in to 8GB of vRAM and "looks like crap".
 
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How about you read my post again. This time with brain activated

Games looked good when I ran them on two GTX 570s. Then when I replaced them with a 980Ti, at the same settings, the game looked exactly the same, even though there was more VRAM to load textures into on the 980Ti vs the 570s.

If you're trying to elude that a 3060, that's just underwhelming slower than the 3060Ti will be a better choice because it has 4GB more of VRAM.....huh, I wonder why the 980Ti didn't make the games I was playing look nicer.

My 980Ti must have been defective. Damn it....I used it for 6 years....6 years I used a defective card! Curse you 980Ti and your defectiveness! /s
 
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That would be a good point - if I had been arguing the opposite. Yes, the lack of frametime data and/or .1%/1% lows in TPU's charts is a weakness, and it is entirely possible that some of those average FPS numbers are misleading. But in general, they won't be. The problem with only looking at averages is that you're unable to spot the outliers, not that the overall image is wrong.

Except that mGPU has been a shitshow since the first implementation of SLI, and DX12 putting the onus for making it work entirely on developers was exactly what made it problematic previously (the few games that had official profiles worked okay-ish, everything else was crap, and developers are always pressed on time). DS is supposedly easily implemented, is standard on the Xbox consoles (which is a huge push for adoption by itself), and ultimately does the same that already happens, just faster and more efficiently. So while I agree that betting on future tech to save the day is generally a bad idea, DS seems like one of those (relatively few) cases where it's likely to work out decently. As advertised? Unlikely. But as an improvement over the current "okay, on the current trajectory in 10 seconds the player might enter areas A, B or C, each of which need 500MB of new textures loaded, and we can't expect more than 200MB/s, so let's start caching!"? That's a given. And, as I said above, that doesn't even need DirectStorage, it just requires games to be developed with the expectation of SSD storage.

It seems like you're trying to make some "gotcha" point here, but ... *ahem*

So ... yes?

My whole point was: "you can't trust VRAM readouts from drivers or software, as they are not representative of actual VRAM usage" - as a counter to your "I've seen games come close to 7GB, so 8GB is going to be too little soon" argument. The point of my argument isn't specifically whether or not 8GB is sufficient or not, but more broadly that you need to look at actual performance data and not VRAM usage. Your initial statement was made on a deeply flawed basis - much more flawed than the absence of .1% data in TPU's reviews.

To make this extra clear: Your argument that I responded to was "I'm seeing >7GB, so we might soon be hitting 8GB and be bottlenecked." My response was "here's an example of a game that shows 9GB of VRAM usage, yet is only clearly bottlenecked on 6GB or lower."

As for whether the lower amount of VRAM will bring your from "a playable near 30" to something lower: at that point you need to lower your damn settings. Seriously. This is at Ultra. Playing at Ultra is always dumb and wasteful, even on a flagship GPU. And yes, lowering texture quality is often a lot more noticeable than other settings with a similar performance gain. But when you're at the "can I hit 30 or not" point in performance, well, either you're playing a game where smoothness doesn't matter, or you'll have a better play experience lowering your settings.

As I apparently have to repeat myself:

I mean ... this should be pretty clear. The important thing is a GPU with a good balance of compute and VRAM. In current games, and as VRAM usage has developed in the past years, 8GB is unlikely to be a significant bottleneck for anything but the most powerful GPUs at resolutions they are actually capable of rendering at half-decent framerates. If you're buying a 3060 Ti to play at 2160p Ultra, then either you are making some particularly poor choices or you are well aware that this will not result in a smooth experience (which, depending on the game, can be perfectly fine). If you are buying a 3060 Ti, have a 2160p monitor, and refuse to lower your resolution or settings? Then you are letting stubbornness get in the way of enjoying your games, and the bottleneck is your attitude, not the GPU. Either way, even the 3070 Ti (with its 26% additional compute resources) will most likely do just fine with its 8GB for the vast majority of titles at the settings it can otherwise handle. That card has a higher chance of being bottlenecked by VRAM in some titles, and no doubt will, but enough for it to really matter? Not likely. And certainly not to a degree that can't be overcome by adjusting a few settings.
We're taking, again, a very flawed instrument to have this discussion.

Far Cry 6 is a very recent example.
What it shows, is that on cards at 4-5 years of age, the combination of lower VRAM and tighter bus is killing the otherwise still 'decent enough' core performance. Far Cry 6 is a mainstream title. What's more interesting is what type of games you'll be playing at a 4-5 year age on your GPU.

I've lived the practice of that, as I'm doing right now. And its very easy to distill what happens. The fact that I'm still fine with 8GB, is what's saving my 1080's performance and doesn't cause it to fall off sharply like the 1660ti does today (and note, has a mere 2,5 years in age!). I can play FC6 just fine and Cyberpunk happily takes 8GB and produces 50 FPS nonetheless, without meaningful IQ sacrifice. But in a relative sense - the 1660ti at 6GB and the 1080 at 8GB are quite well balanced in terms of core power. Now, fast forward to today, because in the absence of data of the future 4-5 years from now, we need to extrapolate what we have. We're looking at much faster GPUs endowed with the same 6GB (2060, on par with 1080 core perf) and with the same 8GB on a 3060 that is way faster on the core.

I'm not sure what's in the way of logical thought processes here with people, but we're specifically talking about what GPU X or Y is going to be worth in terms of future proofing 4-5 years down the line. Its the exact question the OP is asking. And in thát situation, 8GB on a card with 3060ti performance is just bad balance. No matter the cache it has and how things changed in its architecture. No matter what arcane technology gets stacked on top in certain titles. The bottom line, stands. We had an 8GB card in 2016 and now we have an 8GB card in 2021-2022 with 40-50% higher core perf. It won't last, and it will be capped at the exact same IQ level my 2016 1080 is going to be, while it has lots of core oomph to spare, in any similar use case. At the same time, I'm seeing a very nice, rather well balanced dropoff on the older 8GB card, where as you say, most of the time, most games are forcing you to dial back regardless and stay within your VRAM cap. But I can still max textures at nearly no perf hit. All I need to do is kill some overexpensive post processing (Ultra > High) to keep my perf. A 3060ti, 4-5 years down the line, will be making far greater sacrifices on IQ, and likely not the ones you'd prefer.

This mismatch between VRAM cap and much higher core perf serves an obvious purpose, one Nvidia is well known for. It hard caps VRAM so that the urge to upgrade will arise even for people who are just fine with somewhat lower FPS and good IQ alongside it. Its a form of planned obscolesence and while Turing pushed that button slightly, Ampere is ramming it like no other. The market is clearly asking for higher VRAM cap GPUs, consoles are clearly going for over 8GB, AMD has a stack with more across the board per tier and games are already looking for higher allocation than 8GB as it is. How many writings on the wall do you really need? Don't even believe my word for it. Believe Nvidia itself, when it produces double VRAM, same SKU products in the same Ampere stack - and note, even in the absence of working SLI... the last GPUs they doubled VRAM on were all with SLI fingers, where the double VRAM serves an obvious purpose.

Bandwidth can certainly take part of capacity out of the equation 'before you start to notice'. But that has its limits too, and is highly dependant on careful driver tweaks and per-game optimizations. Yet another example of what developers are not going to spend a lot of budget on, except if the game has great reception. It works well for AAA, but not so well for less popular software.


However... in this current comparison, 3060ti is still the better option, and I think I did agree on that earlier in this topic. I also added, that it is far from ideal. The choice between a 3060 12 GB and a 3060ti 8 GB is a choice between poorly balanced products for long term usage.
 
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Dux

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Games looked good when I ran them on two GTX 570s. Then when I replaced them with a 980Ti, at the same settings, the game looked exactly the same, even though there was more VRAM to load textures into on the 980Ti vs the 570s.

If you're trying to elude that a 3060, that's just underwhelming slower than the 3060Ti will be a better choice because it has 4GB more of VRAM.....huh, I wonder why the 980Ti didn't make the games I was playing look nicer.

My 980Ti must have been defective. Damn it....I used it for 6 years....6 years I used a defective card! Curse you 980Ti and your defectiveness! /s
OK, last post. Done with this. If you think 8GB of VRAM will be enough for at least next 4 years to play all games with texture quality on max, go for 3060Ti. Otherwise i would go with 3060 with 12GB of VRAM and just OC the GPU and VRAM to tighten the performance gap. Killing the 2 flies with one shot would be buying RX 6700 XT. Slightly more expensive than 3060 Ti. Depending on the model.
 
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I've been in EVGA queue for both of these products for almost a year. The 3060 12GB is likely to come up first. I have a question regarding predicting which is more likely to have staying power ~4 years out from now. I tend to run stuff a really long time. The 3060ti processor is much faster but the 12GB ram is possibly better in this aspect if lower vram amounts end up being a limiting factor. What do you guys think?

The main reason I ask is in 2013, I once purchased a 770 2GB instead of the 4GB because I was told the card wasn't really fast enough to matter. After a few years, the limited VRAM became an issue that prevented me from running some games. Similarly, the 780ti's 3GB severely limited that card just a couple years after its launch, despite being close to a 980 in performance otherwise.
Go with the 3060 12GB. You'll get more longevity out of it.
 
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We're taking, again, a very flawed instrument to have this discussion.
Well, yes. Predicting the future will always be flawed. That's why discussions are productive, though! We can at least try to get down to why predicting this is difficult, if nothing else.
Far Cry 6 is a very recent example.
That was the point - about as up to date as you're going to get in terms of game development and thus VRAM usage in AAA titles.
What it shows, is that on cards at 4-5 years of age, the combination of lower VRAM and tighter bus is killing the otherwise still 'decent enough' core performance. Far Cry 6 is a mainstream title. What's more interesting is what type of games you'll be playing at a 4-5 year age on your GPU.

I've lived the practice of that, as I'm doing right now. And its very easy to distill what happens. The fact that I'm still fine with 8GB, is what's saving my 1080's performance and doesn't cause it to fall off sharply like the 1660ti does today (and note, has a mere 2,5 years in age!). I can play FC6 just fine and Cyberpunk happily takes 8GB and produces 50 FPS nonetheless, without meaningful IQ sacrifice. But in a relative sense - the 1660ti at 6GB and the 1080 at 8GB are quite well balanced in terms of core power. Now, fast forward to today, because in the absence of data of the future 4-5 years from now, we need to extrapolate what we have. We're looking at much faster GPUs endowed with the same 6GB (2060, on par with 1080 core perf) and with the same 8GB on a 3060 that is way faster on the core.
IMO you're still mixing a few factors here that make this comparison problematic though: That a 2.5-year-old midrange card (1660Ti) struggles with a brand new AAA title at 2160p? That's expected. Heck, that was expected when it was new. The 1660Ti has never been able to handle 2160p Ultra in any reasonable way. The 1080 supposedly was at the time it was new, but that's due to games then being less demanding and no faster cards existing - and most reviews back then still pointed out that even the 1080 Ti wasn't really fast enough for 2160p60 Ultra.

So, while you're right that the 1660Ti underperforms, it underperforms in a scenario it has never been suited for, and where it would perform poorly no matter what. Sure, it would likely be around 30fps instead of 20. But at that point, the only sensible approach (unless you're playing a game where framerate really doesn't matter) is to turn down your settings or resolution. Thus, the point is moot. It was unsuited to the task before the VRAM bottleneck ever came into question.
I'm not sure what's in the way of logical thought processes here with people, but we're specifically talking about what GPU X or Y is going to be worth in terms of future proofing 4-5 years down the line. Its the exact question the OP is asking. And in thát situation, 8GB on a card with 3060ti performance is just bad balance. No matter the cache it has and how things changed in its architecture. No matter what arcane technology gets stacked on top in certain titles. The bottom line, stands. We had an 8GB card in 2016 and now we have an 8GB card in 2021-2022 with 40-50% higher core perf. It won't last, and it will be capped at the exact same IQ level my 2016 1080 is going to be, while it has lots of core oomph to spare, in any similar use case. At the same time, I'm seeing a very nice, rather well balanced dropoff on the older 8GB card, where as you say, most of the time, most games are forcing you to dial back regardless and stay within your VRAM cap. But I can still max textures at nearly no perf hit. All I need to do is kill some overexpensive post processing (Ultra > High) to keep my perf. A 3060ti, 4-5 years down the line, will be making far greater sacrifices on IQ, and likely not the ones you'd prefer.
There's a flaw in your logic here: just because the older 8GB cards aren't bottlenecked doesn't mean they're actively using 8GB - the next step down is 6GB, so all we know is >6GB <8GB. And VRAM usage across games on average creeps up relatively slowly. Over the past decade we've gone from 2GB at the high end to 8GB in the mid-range and 16GB at the high end (and from 1080p at the high end to 2160p, though lower resolution were still very common in 2011-ish), with visible bottlenecks at 2160p showing up first at 4GB a couple of years back, then 6GB more recently. Expecting 8GB to be performance-breakingly insufficient within 4-5 years, at resolutions that these GPUs are reasonably equipped to handle? Yeah, no, I don't believe that. At 2160p Ultra, sure, but these GPUs can't handle that now, and definitely won't handle that in 4-5 years, however much VRAM they might have. At 1440p or 1080p? Even with high quality textures, 8GB is likely to be plenty for many years to come. In the FC6 test, the 4GB 5500 XT might seem to be toeing the line at 1440p, as there's a noticeable relative performance loss compared to 1080p - but it's overall still small, likely indicative of occasional stuttering. And if 4GB is borderline enough for 1440p Ultra today, there's no way whatsoever 8GB will be insufficient in 4-5 years. VRAM needs have never increased that rapidly, and there's no reason why they would start doing so now.
This mismatch between VRAM cap and much higher core perf serves an obvious purpose, one Nvidia is well known for. It hard caps VRAM so that the urge to upgrade will arise even for people who are just fine with somewhat lower FPS and good IQ alongside it. Its a form of planned obscolesence and while Turing pushed that button slightly, Ampere is ramming it like no other. The market is clearly asking for higher VRAM cap GPUs, consoles are clearly going for over 8GB, AMD has a stack with more across the board per tier and games are already looking for higher allocation than 8GB as it is. How many writings on the wall do you really need? Don't even believe my word for it. Believe Nvidia itself, when it produces double VRAM, same SKU products in the same Ampere stack - and note, even in the absence of working SLI... the last GPUs they doubled VRAM on were all with SLI fingers, where the double VRAM serves an obvious purpose.
Double VRAM SKUs is a marketing tactic, nothing more, nothing less. The 3060 has 12GB because 6GB would make it look bad compared to AMD's 8GB cards for spec-illiterate buyers. The 2060 12GB is a cash grab, period - if they cared about supply at all, they would just stuff the market with standard 2060s - the 6GB isn't holding it back at resolutions it's suited for (1440p and 1080p). But precisely because there's this prevalent idea that you need 8GB or even more because a lot of games opportunistically allocate tons of VRAM if it exists, people get roped into these misconceptions about what makes a SKU worth buying. "The market" is not rational. And it is certainly not well informed. Thus, what the "market wants" is often a poor choice of guideline for making a good product.

I mean, look at the FC6 numbers for the 2060. The VRAM "use" reading is >7GB for every single resolution on the 3090, yet the 2060 shows no sign of underperforming whatsoever - it's exactly where you'd expect it. Heck, except for 2160p the 8GB 2070 has worse performance regressions compared to the TPU test suite mean, even if those differences are marginal. It is of course possible that these average numbers are hiding stuttering and poor 1%/.1% performance, and I'd kind of expect that at 2160p given results with other 6GB cards in that test), but at 1440p and 1080p? Not a chance.

And, again, even if you have a 2160p monitor and "only" a 2060: insisting on playing on ultra is dumb. Heck, most 2160p panels have sufficient pixel density to look decently sharp even at non-native resolutions, so 1440p (or 4:1 scaled 1080p) would be a much better choice on that monitor for most games if you insist on Ultra, though 2106p mid-high would likely work decently too. And you can of course again complain that this is a new and expensive card and so on, but again: it isn't a 2160p Ultra card. It never has been. Not when new, not now, not 4-5 years after launch. And that's fine.


IMO, a huge part of what has changed here is not the imbalance between compute and VRAM, even if that has been on a gradual increase since the birth of GPUs more or less, but the fact that reviewers have started focusing on 2160p and that games all stream their assets aggressively and opportunistically. When we're talking about GPUs barely capable of 2160p Ultra today, the question of longevity at that setting level is already answered. That isn't what these GPUs are suited for, so the answer to the question of which would handle that best in the future would be like asking which human is best at breathing underwater - there might be a difference, but it definitely doesn't matter. Thus, the question must be moved to lower settings levels and/or resolutions - that's a necessity when thinking of GPU longevity. And VRAM needs drop off dramatically then, with even 6GB clearly being sufficient today. Thus, it's reasonably safe to assume that the 8GB 3060 Ti will perform the best at reasonable settings and resolutions in 4-5 years, just as it does today. There will no doubt be outliers then too, of games with astronomical VRAM needs and dumb bugs, but ultimately, none of these GPUs are likely to be meaningfully VRAM bottlenecked before they are bottlenecked by their compute capabilities. Which was exactly what I said in my first post here, just without the 2000 words explaining the reasoning behind it.
 
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I don't know if the day will ever come that a 3060 will be faster than a 3060 Ti. 8GB of vRAM can fit today's textures at ultra settings in 1440p.
Even if in 5 years we will have games that require 8GB for low settings. Do you really think those textures would look muddy or "like crap" ? 8GB worth ? And that having 4GB more and 30% less GPU power would be better ?

I think not. I am buying hardware for current requirements. Not for some distant future. Imagine this minning madness never stopping and the prices being this inflated 5 years from now. How would any AAA game will sell good on PC. If people need to have a 12GB card to run the game in 1440p and low details. It would mean the death of PC gaming.
So, either 8GB would be sufficient for low to medium details at 1080[/1440p or miners would have overwhelmed the AAA PC gaming market. The latter situation would be very bad for our hobby.

PS: speaking about a distant future. Imagine in 2016 someone telling you that GPU prices would double or tripple in 2021 at the same performance level. How hard would you have laughed at that person ?
 
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i have a 3060ti, i would not trade it for a 3060 but i already had to take settings down because it passed the 8GB on resident evil village. It could certainly use more VRAM, today, not to mention in a 1 year or 2
 
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i have a 3060ti, i would not trade it for a 3060 but i already had to take settings down because it passed the 8GB on resident evil village. It could certainly use more VRAM, today, not to mention in a 1 year or 2
Did you actually see judder or performance drops? At what resolution?
 

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Outside of a few edge cases with massive VRAM needs, the Ti is likely to last longer simply due to being faster. As has been mentioned above, it's crucial to remember that system reported VRAM "usage" is wildly inflated in most games through opportunistic pre-caching of assets, most of which are never used before being ejected in favor of pre-caching of other assets again. VRAM usage numbers are thus not really an indicator of anything other than how aggressively the game streams in assets that might be useful. Real VRAM-induced performance limitations are found in framerate/frametime measurements. Typically seen as especially bad 1%/.1% lows, but also as unexpectedly bad averages if the bottleneck is sufficiently bad.

As for predicting future developments, actual VRAM needs in games have grown relatively slowly over the past decade, and while they are indeed higher across the board, history has shown that most GPUs are held back by compute long before they are held back by VRAM capacity. Of course history doesn't predict the future, but change is also typically slow and gradual. Plus, technologies like DirectStorage have the potential to lower actual VRAM capacity needs quite noticeably through enabling vastly faster on-the-fly streaming of assets.
A well thought out and well written take which is absolutely spot on.
Dialing down texture res is a significant IQ hit
Going from Ultra to low is, but if we're talking Ultra down to very high or high (equivalents) I disagree. Sure if you have the VRAM, fill it, but I don't find 1-2 notches down on textures to significantly affect the games I play, in fact most times I'm hard pressed to notice any difference whatsoever.

I'd argue losing ~30% GPU performance is the more significant and consistent 'hit' they'd be taking to make the choice of a 3060 over the Ti, and they'd be taking it from the get go.
If you are buying a 3060 Ti, have a 2160p monitor, and refuse to lower your resolution or settings? Then you are letting stubbornness get in the way of enjoying your games, and the bottleneck is your attitude, not the GPU
So much this. One way or another the vast majority of us are tweaking all manner of settings to get the balance of visuals to FPS right, and that's a highly personal set of choices.
it's reasonably safe to assume that the 8GB 3060 Ti will perform the best at reasonable settings and resolutions in 4-5 years, just as it does today.
Exactly this yet again, it will essentially always be an appropriate texture setting relative to the other settings the GPU can manage anyway. Why take a ~30% hit on FPS today and for the next 4-5 years? The overall experience will always be better on the 3060Ti.
Even if in 5 years we will have games that require 8GB for low settings. Do you really think those textures would look muddy or "like crap" ? 8GB worth ? And that having 4GB more and 30% less GPU power would be better ?
Yet another great point that I hadn't even considered.
 
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Yes. Im not contesting that. Rather you could say its the combination of bandwidth and capacity. But for its bandwidth and its capacity, the 3060ti has 'too much' core.
I wouldn't say that. The 3060Ti has performance around a 2080S, or something? And that was fine w/ 8GB really, and still is.
 
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I would rather have 100FPS with High Texture Quality than 70FPS with Ultra Texture Quality
 

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Identical situation awaits you if you buy a card today that has 8GB of video memory. I think everyone who reccomend 3060ti with 8GB is really short sighted and completely missed the point that you are asking for a card that will have enough VRAM for new games 4 years from now. You will find yourself in a situation where developers reccomend 10-12GB of VRAM with RDNA 3 and RTX 4000 series cards on the market, you will have RTX 3060 Ti that gives slightly better fps and then you must lower textures to medium, and the game just looks bad. While on RTX 3060 you can simply lower the quality of shadows, ambient occlusion and some other barely noticable things for example and get the same fps but with high quality textures. And in the end better looking game. While lower quality textures are quite noticable and have big impact on how the game looks overall.

This argument comes back, and sometimes it has merit, but generally it has turned out that it's better to buy more raw power than more memory. The 128MB Radeon 9000 vs the 64MB Radeon 9000 Pro argument takes me back...
 

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This argument comes back, and sometimes it has merit, but generally it has turned out that it's better to buy more raw power than more memory. The 128MB Radeon 9000 vs the 64MB Radeon 9000 Pro argument takes me back...

Yep, my vote is 3060Ti ;)
 
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I wouldn't say that. The 3060Ti has performance around a 2080S, or something? And that was fine w/ 8GB really, and still is.

2080S is a 2019 GPU, it better be. And yet, it will also find a small selection of games already where it falls short on 8GB with that amount of core perf. Turing already was a step back in VRAM/core.

Is that horrible? No. Is it sub optimal? Definitely. And that's what I've been saying. 3060 / 3060ti is a choice of suboptimal product. 12GB on the 3060 makes as little sense as 8GB on the Ti.
 

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Double VRAM SKUs is a marketing tactic, nothing more, nothing less.
Nope, they never were. Double VRAM catered to a good 10~15% of market demand that was aimed at SLI/Crossfire buyers that would drain the late-in-gen-stock for Nvidia and AMD. It was always a great way to move units, and for those reasons dual GPU was always priced about 10% more favorable in FPS/dollar, even if you took some support issues in your stride. Spec illiterate was never expected beyond the midrange, and never catered to. And it isn't today. There is only market demand and how do we sell units. What part of that is marketing and what's real demand? Good luck drawing that line. A salesman knows: business is about 'creating demand'. Demand is demand. Today, Nvidia releases those units because there is demand, because the market spoke out against low VRAM amounts, and Nvidia wasn't capable of sourcing enough chips for the double amount, or any unholy combination of these factors.

If you apply the marketing tactic about VRAM to the segment below midrange, ie OEM-midrange prebuilts, laptops, and casual gaming gpus then yes, you would be right - that is the segment of illiterate buyers that say 'moar better' without looking at what's behind the numbers.

The 3090 also got a double VRAM version, which was specifically aimed at 'creators'. Similarly, Titans were marketed specifically at some gray area of enthusiasts (the last group you'd expect to be tech illiterate) that would be semi pro as well.
 
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Did you actually see judder or performance drops? At what resolution?

No, because i didn't let it past the limit. But i'm sure that's what would happen, 1440p
But don't just panic this is one example, RE games are notorious for eating VRAM, just like RE2 remake did back in the day

I wouldn't say that. The 3060Ti has performance around a 2080S, or something? And that was fine w/ 8GB really, and still is.

2 years have passed like already mentioned, and now DLSS or even FSR lets you use more of your card, you can do resolutions you couldn't with a 2080s back in 2019
 
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