> that extra memory is just about useless.
Same goes today, unless you're doing other things than just gaming. But top of the line cards come with 24GB VRAM, most games never come close to using that much VRAM.
Same goes today, unless you're doing other things than just gaming. But top of the line cards come with 24GB VRAM, most games never come close to using that much VRAM.
In addition, undersized vram amounts is one of the ways in which Nvidia limits the usable life of their video cards.
Theoretically the extra VRAM on a 3Dfx Voodoo did that as well. But in reality not really. 3D accelerators were blossoming so quickly that old cards were obsoleted, fast.
Probably even more relevantly, games didn't have as many tweakable graphics options. Today's games are multiplatform and built to run on a wide variety of spec'd devices, from PS4/XBOne era hardware up to superpowered gaming PCs. If I've got an older card with lots of memory running a newer game I can keep everything else at medium and bump texture quality to high. Games in 1997 generally weren't really built quite that flexibly.
It may take until the _next_ console generation for 24gb cards to get well and truly utilized, but the 12gb seen on Nvidia's current midrange cards may quickly feel anemic.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dx12-optimization-cpu-gpu-...
That seems more because devs didn't do a good job in porting a 10 year old game (released in 2013) that ran perfectly fine on a PS3, which only had 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of VRAM. The PC TLOU port is not advancing the state-of-the-art in graphics, it should not be seen as a sign of the new normal.
It could have been avoided of course. But the difference still existed.
The pitfall is that if you're short on VRAM you can feel like you're moving through treacle near doors you don't even intend to open! All at 60fps...
I knew approximately 6 or 7 people with 3D graphics cards back then. And 2 of us had the 6MB Voodoo cards.
But then again it was just a very different time in 1997. Video games were already 20+ years old in the mainstream at that point. But the idea of buying a special "3D graphics card" for your PC was still pretty new. So if you were "crazy" enough to do that in the first place then spending another $50 on the "best" card was a fairly common decision.