The New Nvidia 1080 and 1070 Gbs

[MontyInHD]

Can anyone tell me why the new GTX cards have only 8GBs, is it something to do with the processing speed just being so quick that 16 Gbs isn't needed?

Thanks for any help.

 

[king3pj]

Can anyone tell me why the new GTX cards have only 8GBs, is it something to do with the processing speed just being so quick that 16 Gbs isn't needed?

Thanks for any help.

16GBs of VRAM would just add to the cost of the GPU without any performance gains. It is completely unneccessary. Someone posted an article in a different thread that showed the 4GB 290 had identical performance to the the rebadged 8GB 390 when clocked to the same speed.

The point is that the extra 4GB on a 390 is mostly for marketing purposes. It doesn't actually improve framerates. 8GBs will be plenty for the 1070 and 1080 even at 4K. By the time a game needs to use more than 8GB of VRAM these cards won't be fast enough to make use of it anyways.

 

[SoNic67]

Games don't need more than 4GB memory today. 8GB gives a reserve, but that might be not even relevant.
The only apps that can use more memory than that are the GPU computing apps, but that's Quadro and Tesla cards teritory anyway.