With video card prices finally dropping (still high, but lower than they’ve been in years), I have been thinking about picking one up eventually. Probably no higher than a 10 or 12GB 3080 series.
What I’m not so clear on is how much RAM I should buy to back up a card of this size. There’s the usual mantra of “more is better,” but are there any articles that specifically benchmark performance by RAM amount, for at least a small variety of video cards and model types? Basically I’m trying to gauge how much I would suffer if I stuck to my current 16GB. Thanks.
It depends on how many other things you will do while using your GPU (e.g. many browser tabs will use quite a lot of ram). As a rule of thumb, it’s recommended to have at last twice the amount of VRAM. So if you buy a 12gb card, 24gb would be ok, but I personally recommend 32, given the current prices of ram.
Thanks Andrea, I haven’t been paying attention these past couple of years so I didn’t notice RAM is around US $4/GB…pretty good deal. I’ll scoop up another 16GB and I should be set. Out of curiosity I might still do some benchmarks on various models, FP16 training vs 32 etc. Browsing won’t be a problem, I’ll just do that on another machine Anyway, thanks for the input!
Does RAM speed/latency ever make much difference? E.g. 3200 CL16 is comparable in price to 3600 CL18 etc, and if bandwidth is more important than latency it might make sense to adopt DDR5 early? I have read that it doesn’t really matter, but I’m not sure why this is the case.
I’m not sure either, and I have heard the same things you have, for example:
I guess, at least where the technology is right now, other components will bottleneck the process before RAM does? That’s what I’m gathering. The only thing you’ll want to make sure of is that the RAM speed is compatible with your CPU. AMD’s in general seem to be designed for higher speeds.
Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if this becomes more important as time goes on…anything can change at any time in this field.
Thanks, that makes sense. I know there is typically a sweet spot for price/performance for each processor for gaming, so it’s probably a safe bet to check that and call it a day, but I would be interested to understand how it works properly regardless.
I think faster RAM can sometimes cause stability issues also, particularly with DDR5 at the moment, which is obviously not ideal for this use case. I assume data centre RAM runs at a slower speed than the typical stuff most consumers are buying for gaming etc also for that reason, and nobody is bothered about how fast the RAM is on their cloud server! So it probably has a negligible impact outside of very fringe cases/extreme RAM speed profiles.