Begun, the VRAM wars have. AMD is doubling down on its VRAM advantage over Nvidia in its latest social media salvo. AMD has seemingly chosen to keep its RDNA3 midrange offerings at bay for now, so instead, it's reminding gamers that its older GPUs offer what gamers crave—16GB of VRAM at a reasonable price.
Sasa Marinkovik, AMD's senior director of marketing, tweeted a chart showing the company's VRAM and pricing advantage compared with Nvidia's Ampere and Ada Lovelace offerings. The company has lowered the price of several RDNA2 GPUs to compete more favorably against Nvidia's latest offerings, putting it in the position of offering more VRAM at a lower price than comparable Nvidia cards. The standout value now is the Radeon RX 6800, which features 16GB of VRAM for just $499. The closest Nvidia GPU is the RTX 3070, which has just 8GB of memory and sells for $499 on sale to $550 or so, given the marketplace and model in question. Overall, the RX 6800 is also faster than the RTX 3070 in rasterization.
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On paper, AMD has a clear advantage over Nvidia in VRAM. However, VRAM isn't everything, as you still need plenty of ponies under the hood to extract satisfactory performance from certain titles. AMD's Achilles heel is still ray tracing, and that goes for both its last-gen and current-gen GPUs. For example, Cyberpunk 2077's brutal path tracing "Overdrive" mode is practically unplayable at 1440p on the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. In contrast, it can run at 60fps using DLSS 3 frame gen on the lowly RTX 4070, so Nvidia still has ray tracing performance as its ace card. There's also the issue of both companies' software suites, which is a subjective thing.
AMD is one generation behind Nvidia in ray tracing on the hardware and software fronts. However, at CES this year, it teased its upcoming FSR 3.0 technology, which will offer frame generation similar to Nvidia's DLSS 3. AMD talked about it at length at GDC in March, but there's still no timetable for an official launch. It should theoretically double frame rates, though AMD is recommending it only be used in games already running at 60fps to make the added latency less noticeable.
Also, if you're the type of gamer that cares about VRAM more than anything else, HotHardware points out you can get a 16GB GPU for just $339—from Intel. The Acer BiFrost A770 is on sale at Amazon at a steep discount. The Intel-branded 16GB A770 has a retail price of just $349, though this GPU is targeting 1080p gaming mainly.