Does MSFS in VR really need more than 10gig VRAM?

[Sharpe2603]

I’m starting to feel pretty ■■■■■■ about my 3080 right now. It seems, from a few posts here and there, that MSFS utilizes more than 10gig VRAM in certain situations in VR. Is this really true or are people confusing actual VRAM usage with how much VRAM is allocated?

[tempestornado23]

I think the answer might be both: there are some situations that really tax the VRAM from what I have seen watching some of recent youtube videos from VR users (the guys figuring out all the settings optimizations that Asobo/MS didn’t do for us) but in those cases they are in high traffic airports/cities and have their settings quite high to demonstrate their new 3080/3090. I also don’t fully understand if MSFS has room for optimization of the allocated vram versus really needed/used vram…and have seem some posts about the fact that the allocated vram is quite a bit more than used vram in some situations. And then when I see the new 3060 card with 12GB (but slightly less cuda cores than the 3060ti), it makes me think that nVidia might be headed in a direction of adding vram to future versions across the entire 30xx line (so close the gap a bit between the 3090 and the other cards). I have a 3060ti and am happy with it and haven’t run into any problems with vram, the limitations for my setup have been the GPU processing itself and also the very poor CPU utilization of the game (the Developer mode and other tools to monitor usage show VRAM headroom but bottlenecks elsewhere when I have settings too high for my rig).

[CptLucky8]

You might want to read this about VRAM and RAM:

[HOW-TO] Graphics Settings and Performance Guide - Discussion Thread

@MrTonySM Your post is making realizing something indeed! Yesterday someone was enquiring about why is it Task Manager was reporting his GPU was “allocating” more RAM that what’s available onboard. And I’ve answered this is normal because the API (DX11 for example) is allocating RAM to store buffer data when you pass it to, then is keeping some buffer data in RAM even after streaming the data to VRAM, in case the buffer is discarded and need to be re-uploaded later to the video card. This is no…

[RebuffedBee9595]

From reading a few threads it seems there are some documented cases of 3090 utilising more than 10gb of its VRAM. However I wondered if anyone more technical than me can say whether, at those times it is showing eg 14gb, is it proven that the 3090 is performing significantly better than it would if it had just 10gb of capacity (like the 3080 card), or would it simply have purged (or shifted to system RAM?) the “oldest” 4gb of data and continued at similar performance levels with 10gb utilisation?

(The reason I am interested is is I am about to pull the trigger on a 5800x and 3080 system for driving a Quest 2 VR setup, and desperately trying to convince myself not to spend an additional £600+ for the 3090 )

[EgnixVeenstorp]

I saw ~15-16GB being used on my 3090 & G2 when flying around London. This was according to MSFS’s FPS display.

[Beulah6126]

I have 16GB of VRAM in my 6800XT. I have yet to see the sim using more than 10GB in the developer’s FPS display. So I am wondering if the sim treats NVIDIA cards differently.