Anyone seen any articles on VRAM capacity vs bandwidth?
Curious as to how futureproof an 8GB RTX 3060 Ti will be at 1440p over the next couple of years considering that next gen consoles should start to stretch AAA titles a bit more. Although 8GB on the 3060/3070 sounds a bit limited I'm aware that GDDR6 has twice the bandwidth of GDDR5, and GDDR6X a further increase so raw throughput is akin to 16GB+ on a Pascal era card. Seems plausible that a 6700 or 6700XT could have say 12GB, but then you're sacrificing RT performance.
Something like the 8GB RTX 3060 Ti should be fine for 1080p and 1440p for a couple of years or so. However, that's not to say that some of the more demanding games may need slight config / setting tweaks to balance performance vs. fidelity. VRAM usage is going to climb for sure - more complex rendering methods will increase the need for more G-buffer space, higher fidelity source assets will be competing for space, non-graphics GPU related work (highly parallel) will also come with its own VRAM requirements. That said, there has been (and continues to be) work going on in the various underlying graphics APIs that take advantage of new hardware features and new novel data transfer methods that reduce the amount of data being sent to/from the GPU (across the bus) - reducing bandwidth costs and making more efficient use of available VRAM.
If raytracing is your thing then the nVidia cards are the way to go at the moment. However, a very strong case can be put forward for AMDs cards simply due to the fact they really have upped their game massively and, with this new generation of cards at least, invested heavily in the rasterization performance of their cards. It was, in my opinion, a sensible move to dedicate more of their cards' die space to more VRAM and high speed cache (and not dedicated Tensor cores or equivalent). They are effectively a step or two behind with the RT stuff hence focused on matching (or surpassing in some cases) the rasterization performance of nVidia. There's a lot of work going on right now at both Team Green and Team Red - this latest round of GPU wars seems to have spurred both teams on somewhat, which is a good thing for the end user. Assuming they can get their hands on stock...
(All in my opinion of course).
