About time to upgrade your 8GB GPU for Horizon Forbidden West?

Time to ask the question again, is 8GB VRAM enough?

Jack Goodall

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Horizon Forbidden West has finally been ported to PC, just after two years since it initially released on PS5 and PS4. The good news is that the port is actually pretty good. Optimization is much better than we’ve come to expect these days, though an analysis by Tom’s Hardware reveals that it can be taxing on your video card’s memory.

When finding the best GPU for Horizon Forbidden West, we made sure to cater for high memory usage, recommending at least 12GB with the cost-effective RTX 4070 Super. The AMD graphics-based PS5 can utilize its full 16GB for textures, but not every PC gamer has access to this much VRAM.

Horizon Forbidden West can use more than 8GB VRAM at 1080p

As we said up above, this PC port analysis by Tom’s Hardware gives us a detailed look at how Horizon Forbidden West performs on a wide range of graphics cards. One of the main highlights is that the game can exceed 8GB of VRAM usage, even when playing at 1080p. This is when playing in the ‘very high’ preset, so you can always scale the settings back to avoid framerate-related stuttering. That being said, you can still achieve decent framerates.

They recommend that you’ll want to stick to medium or high settings if you only have access to 8GB of VRAM. This will ‘generally be okay’ at both 1080p and 1440p, though the latter will of course be more demanding on your resources. If you have a 6GB or 4GB card, then definitely opt for low presets.

Furthermore, even though the game is promoted by Nvidia, AMD graphics cards also fare well despite the lack of FSR3 frame generation. DLSS 3 is included though, helping you make the most of its full list of features on 40-series RTX cards.

Is it time to upgrade?

First thing’s first, there’s nothing wrong with having an 8GB GPU in your rig, but they do represent the entry-level these days. We wouldn’t recommend something like 8GB VRAM for 4K gaming, but it is generally more than enough for lower resolutions.

That being said, if you’re the kind of person to play the latest AAA games, then you can expect them to eat up your resources. Games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and now Horizon Forbidden West, are examples of this. It’s worth upgrading from an 8GB graphics card if you want play these games at high settings while avoiding frame drops related to memory.