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That's the amount of VRAM that has shipped in budget to midtier gpu's since at least 2016 with the RX470/480 from AMD. You can find even older & slower examples from Nvidia and AMD (ex. Nvidia 740GT 4GB edition)

Gaming hardware reviewers have been complaining about 4GB of VRAM not being enough since probably 2018 onward.

I have a weird setup with two very old 5:4 1280x1024 monitors I like to use for fun, and even playing Subnautica (2018 Release date) I can use up 3.4GB of VRAM at that low of a resolution on High settings. (playing on a single monitor)

by lucb1e3 hours ago|

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> That's the amount of VRAM that has shipped in budget to midtier gpu's since at least 2016

In desktops maybe, which will be somewhat popular still among people who play a lot of games but not a majority (IDC has laptop sales at a 3 to 1 ratio to desktops in 2022, but that's not specific to people who play games, much less (2d) Factorio players specifically). The system I bought before my current one was in 2018 and mid-tier then was 2GB. There was no craze for (V)RAM at the time, more a question of which setting you want to play games at (and with which render distance) than whether a given laptop works for games at all

As of last month, Steam reports that >15% of their customers still have 4GB VRAM or less: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I'm not familiar with Subnautica beyond the name, is that known for being particularly efficient?

edit: meant to say 4GB rather than 2GB in the Steam stats reference, fixed

by Sohcahtoa822 hours ago|

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> The system I bought before my current one was in 2018 and mid-tier then was 2GB.

Mid-tier laptop GPU in 2018 would have been a GeForce 1060, which came in either 3 or 6 GB variants. GeForce 1050 Ti came in a 2 GB variant, but I wouldn't classify that as mid-tier. The x050 variants (1050, 2050, etc) are budget tier.

by officeplant2 hours ago|

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>As of last month, Steam reports that >10% of their customers have 2GB VRAM or less: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Steam having a massive collection of users with older hardware doesn't really make 4GB of VRAM any larger. My current main machine reports less than 1GB since its an iGPU. (But I've seen it use over 8gb of system memory as VRAM)

>I'm not familiar with Subnautica, is that known for being particularly efficient?

Its a pretty well made unity engine game with a minimum requirement of Intel HD4000 integrated graphics. IDK if it would be consideredban efficient game vs other visually nice from this time frame like DOOM 2016 which runs really well on 4GB vram cards if you stick to 900p and below resoultions.

by throawayonthe1 hours ago|

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at that point can't you just use the integrated gpu which definitely has access to more ram?

by jamesgeck02 hours ago|

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If you play video games, it's basically nothing. I bought a 6 GB VRAM card for ~$300 a decade ago. Many recent games require a minimum of 8 GB VRAM and can scale up to 16 GB VRAM on higher settings.

by lucb1e2 hours ago|

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Sure I play video games, but not usually the ones from the current year. Besides the price of the game itself, it won't run well on laptop hardware anyway and there's such an enormous collection of great games from past years. Factorio is an exception for me, I've played it since not long after the initial release in 2016 and actually got entertainment for so many hours that I thought it fair to buy it a second time ^^'

by Sohcahtoa8247 minutes ago|

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> Sure I play video games, but not usually the ones from the current year.

So you're extrapolating "I bought a budget tier system in 2018 and it plays a 2016 game just fine" to "Nobody needs more than 4 GB of VRAM unless you're running an LLM"

by fabian2k1 hours ago|

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The 2D graphics are heavier than you might suspect. But Factorio is overall a very well optimized game, and it runs far better on my office notebook than any comparable game. This will work fine on any not ancient notebook with integrated graphics.

by BatFastard2 hours ago|

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If ONLY I had know to buy 16 GB of VRam on my cards. I have 12, but they struggle.

Hell if I had know that a 5090 would be worth 6000 USD I would have brought as many of them as I could for 2000 USD!

by Sohcahtoa823 hours ago|

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What the actual fuck are you talking about? This has to be a troll comment.

4 GB is nothing. Mid-grade GPUs from 2013 had 4 GB. Budget GPUs from 2016 (10 years ago!) had 4 GB.

by snazz3 hours ago|

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You can play Factorio on laptops and other devices that don’t have dedicated GPUs. A mid-grade computer from 2013 would be a $599 laptop with a Core i3 integrated GPU that shared the 4 GB of system RAM.

by jamesgeck02 hours ago|

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Such a machine would probably benchmark favorably against the Nintendo Switch, which runs Factorio on downclocked tablet hardware of a similar era.

by harpersealtako2 hours ago|

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the "minimum requirements" aren't even the actual minimum, the game can definitely play on worse machines than that (just inconsistently). I know from personal experience that you can play factorio (at least the base game) on a crappy old 2009 toshiba laptop. Pretty sure it doesn't even have a GPU, just integrated graphics. It doesn't run well but it's not an action game, a little stutter isn't the end of the world and anybody playing on a system like that should not be surprised by it.

by komodo992 hours ago|

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The most potato i've run it on was a CB131 chromebook, (which was about a hundred bucks in 2017) and even then, even though video was chugging at 20fps, the main update loop was locked at 60TPS. very impressive. (and helpful for a 9 hour layover on christmas eve, anecdotally)