When getting your hands on the best graphics card on the market, its graphical performance is the most important asset as it determines the level of games it can handle. However, there’s another hidden spec that’s almost as important and yet not discussed nearly as much as it should be.Before we can get into VRAM, it’s vital to discuss what RAM, or random-access memory, is. RAM is essentially the memory a processor retrieves data from to perform its tasks.

While VRAM has always been around, in recent years it’s suddenly become much more important and discussed at length. There are quite a few reasons for these, which all come back to the rise in high-quality textures being used.The first is higher texture resolution, as games normally store texture resolutions higher than what the actual object requires to be rendered.The second is duplicate textures, in which VRAM stores lower-resolution textures as well as high ones, as the latter are applied to objects at greater distances. This is a process called MIPmapping which avoids the moiré effect.The last one is ray tracing, a more recent process that creates a massive amount of data. Bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) group together objects to better optimize ray tracing but this too uses a considerable amount of
…
Read more