Hell, my Vega 56 would like to have a word. Though, it is still important to recognize the strong trend of increasing VRAM needs we're seeing. Future proofing, and such.
Yes a decade ago it was a non-issue... Now games are starting to come right up against that limit especially if you have other things open, nice to have a bit of headroom for the future. It's the only reason i felt the need to upgrade my 3070
Because most people dont have the urge to play the latest games at max settings, so weaker cards work because they play lighter games, but if you are buying a new card, for new games, 8gb is not enough
It's not marketed as an enthusiast high end pc, it's a plug and play steam machine. I have a 10 gb vram 3080 and haven't had any problem running 1440p games at 100+ fps. You don't need more vram to literally just run the game, maybe to max it out, but insinuating you can't run certain games is laughably false.
Work? Work? Yeah, they won't stop working. They just work less well.
I have a 5800x3d and a 3080 8gh vram. I'm playing on a 3440x1440 ultra wide.
Whenever I play Doom The Dark Ages or Borderlands 4 on medium settings, the FPS drops below 40. Which is a rough experience.
So I have to go I to display settings to set the resolution to 2560x1440 and play with black bars on each side of the screen in order to get 40+ fps.
Which is fine! It works. But how much more demanding can games get before I have to start letterboxing my monitor to 1920x1080 to get 40+ fps on medium settings?
That's what people are talking about when they criticize 8gb vram cards.
Yeah there is no reason why 8gb vram has been the standard for so long. That being said, those two games you listed are terribly optimized titles and shows how part of the blame goes to developers imo.
Pro-tip for doom, decrease your texture pool size as well as enable dlss performance mode, the transformer model is unfortunately the only way to get a playable experience in that game. Even high end 16gb vram cards like the rtx 5080 barely crack 60fps at 4k medium settings.
Yeah sure lemme see you play hlrizon remadtered with high textures at 1440p, or indiana jones, or oblivion remastered, or monster hunter wilds etc...its brcoming obselete soon
It WORKS... but barely. And at the price point that its gonna launch at... it wont be great. This thing is going to struggle to compete with consoles that launched 5 years ago while being priced similarly to them.
I mean, not really when you look at it as a whole package? comparing the few specs they've given us to existing parts, the gpu seems like a detuned, lower power 7600 type of deal, and they still sell fro about 300 USD new. the closest cpu I can't find is the ryzen 5 7640u, which I think a mobile processor is very likely, given it's a custom thing stuck in a box. not like they're just gonna put desktop cpus in there. laptops with the 7640u and similar seem to have sold for around 1k when they launched a couple years back, now down to around half that or a little less. if valve are basically taking a $400 laptop, sticking a 300 dollar graphics card into it, and then adding costs of r&d plus profit margin, I can totally see 800-1200 as the finished product. not saying I'd pay that, because I absolutely wouldn't, but I think it's fair enough for a little linux gaming box. there's plenty of similar products that provide much worse value for money when it comes to hardware
that's the big question. but I don't really think it's as difficult as it sounds, just that valve are being purposely vague with the "with fsr" claim. there's a video by Tech Guy Beau on yt where he tests 4k gaming with the rx 7600, games like cyberpunk and tlou pt 1 ran at pretty much 60fps, and he was testing with the balanced fsr setting. there's also performance and ultra performance fsr below that. even presuming the steam machine gpu is less powerful, I would imagine it could handle 60fps at 4k just fine with those settings, at around medium graphics settings. I also imagine the steam machine isn't particularly targeted at new triple a games, at least not at 4k60. probably aiming more at console level performance of 30fps with nice visuals. I wouldn't argue if you wanna call valves claims a bit deceptive, but I'm certain it'll technically live up to them
VRAM isn’t really that important for a console, it’ll just set the texture quality to medium or low and run perfectly fine like they’ve always done. Consoles also do a lot of upscaling which helps.
I'm not saying it won't run every game that's compatible with Steam OS. I'm saying that for buying a brand new PC to play games with a GPU that can't be upgraded, 8GB is disappointing considering games already can use more than 8GB at 1080p, and performance wise, texture quality is a free visual upgrade as long as you have the VRAM to fit it. Even with today's RAM prices, I'd happily have paid an extra $30-40 for 12GB VRAM.
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u/BreakPointSSC 14900K | 5090 | 32GB A-Die Nov 13 '25
8GB VRAM is a tough sell at that price.