The question of the amount of video memory is an old one, a very old one, but it hasn't been solved yet.
In the past, at the end of the 20th century, the question was: how much RAM did our system need? Everyone remembers Bill Gates' pseudo remark about 640 Kb being "more than enough". While the authenticity of this assertion is more than doubtful, the question of memory quantity has always been a subject. First and foremost the PC's RAM, but very quickly also the video memory on board the graphics card. In this respect, NVIDIA has often been more stingy than AMD, believing, for example, that the famous 8 GB was still a good reference.
As we approach the year 2025, PC Games Hardware has decided that the time has come to take stock. To do so, its editors took the example of two AMD cards that are very close to each other, the Radeon RX 7600 and Radeon RX 7600 XT. The former is equipped with 8 GB of video memory, while the latter boasts twice as much, 16 GB. It's worth noting that the GPUs on both cards are strictly identical, with the same number of computing units. The memory used is also identical, with the same generation and the same bandwidth. The only difference, apart from the extra 8 GB of VRAM, is a very slight increase in the frequency of this memory: it's not this that's going to skew the results.
Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT compared on several games © PC Games Hardware
The results could not be clearer, and clearly illustrate the limits of a configuration with just 8 GB of video memory. PC Games Hardware has logically found games where the differences between the two cards remain modest, but on many games known for their hardware requirements, the gap between the two cards is enormous. While Baldur's Gate 3 retains 96.9% of its animation speed, the same cannot be said for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where only 55.1% of the Radeon RX 7600 XT's performance is lost when switching to the 8GB RX 7600. Things are even worse for the latest games released in 2024: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 retains only 25.3% and Indiana Jones and the Ancient Circle only 22.5%. Under these conditions, it's hard to recommend a graphics card with just 8 GB - for a machine dedicated to video games, of course.
