Godfall makes good use of Radeon RX 6000's memory — requires 12 GB VRAM at 4K Ultra, but it is not all gloom for RTX 3080 owners yet

Counterplay Games recently outed a Partner Showcase video on Godfall in which CEO Keith Lee spoke about how the game makes good use of the new AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPUs and features such as DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), and FidelityFX Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM). He also said that Godfall using 4Kx4K textures requires a lot of memory bandwidth and 12 GB of VRAM.

At the outset, it becomes instantly apparent that the Radeon RX 6000 cards have an advantage here. All the three Radeon RX 6000 cards including the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and the RX 6900 XT come with 16 GB of 256-bit memory with a bandwidth up to 512 GB/s, which is ample RAM for loading textures. Further favoring things for AMD is Infinity Cache that allows Radeon RX 6000 cards to make do with GDDR6 VRAM instead of the more expensive GDDR6X modules used by NVIDIA while still offering similar levels of 4K performance.

This naturally begets the question — is NVIDIA's use of 8 GB and 10 GB VRAM in the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, respectively, a short-sighted vision? Well, it is not really such a straightforward comparison. Unlike consoles, PC games allow for adjusting a lot of variables that can ultimately help in fine-tuning VRAM usage.

There's also this point about games using much less VRAM than what they actually allocate. For most current gen games, 10 GB of VRAM should be just about sufficient for gaming in 4K Ultra settings. Not to forget the fact that technologies such as DirectStorage and Sampler Feedback will help ease VRAM requirements even further.

For creative applications, however, the higher VRAM does play an important role as we have noted in our review of the RTX 3090 wherein 8K workflows in Da Vinci Resolve and even 8K DLSS gaming all gobbled-up VRAM like there's no tomorrow.

That being said, the extra RAM on cards such as the RTX 3090 and the Radeon RX 6000 series helps the cards age better. While it could be possible that Godfall devs have optimized their game keeping AMD cards in mind, we will ultimately reach a point where high resolution textures will require copious amounts of VRAM. But that is still some time away.

Nevertheless, if you are on the lookout for a new GPU to play current and upcoming titles at 4K High or Ultra settings, it may make sense to pick one that offers the maximum amount of VRAM for the money.