8GB Graphics Cards: Still Relevant in 2025 with a Few Adjustments

The authors of WCCF Tech set out to investigate whether 8GB of video memory suffices at the end of 2025. Amid a disaster in the memory market and impending price hikes and shortages of graphics cards, this question is quite pertinent. For their purposes, they chose one of the most powerful new 3D cards with 8GB-the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB. These tests differ from most others as they include a frame rate variation chart.

Such a chart provides a clear visual of any performance issues and when they appear. Unfortunately, the authors selected only five games, but all are relevant and rather well-known projects of recent years. It is also worth noting they tested all games at 1440p resolution with FSR enabled.

Cyberpunk 2077 showcases excellent performance if ray tracing is not enabled. With ray tracing, the game may perform well initially, during the training stages, but then the load sharply increases, and the performance significantly drops, sometimes falling to 20 fps and below.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor reveals behavior often not displayed on charts and diagrams. The game runs at a normal frame rate, but here, there is a problem with loading textures of normal resolution. Disabling ray tracing resolves the issue again, but it’s advisable to lower the graphics settings to medium-high.

Red Dead Redemption 2, released quite a while ago, lacks ray tracing, so it runs excellently on maximum settings, though the chart looks very uneven.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is unplayable with ray tracing. At medium settings, the game works normally for a while, but then the graphical memory overflows and performance drops sharply. However, with ray tracing disabled, maximum graphics settings can be applied to achieve 70-80 fps.

And the fresh Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does not support ray tracing. Still, the settings will have to be slightly reduced to achieve 70-80 fps. Thus, overall, graphics cards with 8GB of video memory are still relevant today and even at 1440p, albeit often necessitating forgetting about ray tracing, enabling an upscaler, and frequently lowering settings from the maximum.