Arc Raiders is a shining beacon of hope in the darkest times of the RAMpocalypse, proving 8 GB budget graphics cards don't have to miss out on glorious graphics

I've recently performed some in-depth testing of VRAM usage in several modern games, to see if 8 GB budget graphics cards are still good enough for gaming in 2026. And it turns out they are—with some caveats.

While the 8 GB variants of the RTX 5060 Ti and RX 9060 XT performed fairly well overall, it was surprising to see just how big the frame rate gap was compared to their 16 GB equivalents. Traditionally, 8 GB and 16 GB budget GPUs have often performed roughly the same, but in this generation of games, that's not so much the case.