Is 8 GB of VRAM Enough Heading Into 2026? Sapphire Pulse 9060 XT 8GB Benchmarked

Recently on the Hardware Unboxed podcast, Edward Crisler (PR Manager of Sapphire NA) made the argument that 8 GB of VRAM is enough for 99% of games, at 1080p. He made this claim in reference to the poorly reviewed 9060 XT 8GB, a card almost universally criticized by reviewers for being heavily limited in its usability and longevity by the size of its VRAM.

The 9060 [XT] gets a lot of bad press, but even the 9060 [XT] 8 gig is not a bad card. It's a very capable gaming card if you have to keep your costs low, for 1080p it really does a great job in 99% of games.

- Edward Crisler, Sapphire

Given I've been using a Sapphire 9060 XT 8GB Pure myself since August, I knew I had to chime in on the conversation when I saw this hot take. Overall, it's a clean-looking card, with well-controlled thermals and near-silent operation, as one should expect from a GPU that consumes just 170W (TBP). With FSR4 Quality enabled - even in games that don't officially support it - it provides a pretty solid gaming experience at 1440P, considering I paid just $225 for it at Microcenter.

However, before we get into my experience with the card, let's look at the hard numbers first. I've tested a handful of games, including some with RT enabled, to see how far one needs to compromise on graphics settings to wrangle modern games into an 8GB VRAM buffer.

Test Setup

• i7 13700K
• MSI Z790MPower
• 2x16GB DDR5 8000C32 Patriot Xtreme5
• Sapphire 9060 XT 8GB Pulse
• Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420mm
• 1TB SN850X PCIE 4.0 SSD
• Seasonic Focus V3-GX1000 80+ Gold

Cyberpunk 2077

Starting off with Cyberpunk, a title in which the 9060 XT enjoys official FSR4 support, performance initially looks good. At 1440P with FSR4 quality, you can get close to 60 FPS with all the settings cranked to the max, and RT lighting at medium (RT shadows, reflections, etc off). Still, the game looks good and performs well in this configuration.

Of course, the performance of the card means nothing if there isn't enough VRAM to sustain it - and here's where the 9060 XT stumbles. Once you progress past the early tutorial area, texture requirements creep past that 8GB mark, immediately tanking performance and turning a 60 FPS experience into more of a 20 FPS slideshow with severe stuttering. Setting texture quality to Medium doesn't stop this from happening, so the only real option is to disable ray-traced lighting, whereupon the performance of the card skyrockets from ~60 to almost 100 FPS, and the game fits comfortably within the VRAM buffer.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Released in 2023, this UE4 title utilises brutal texture culling when exceeding VRAM limits. At 1440P Epic settings with FSR4 Quality (via Optiscaler) and ray tracing enabled, textures throughout the environment are drastically culled to avoid exceeding the VRAM buffer. This ensures that the framerate remains smooth with no stuttering, but has the obvious downside of making everything look rather horrible. This behavior can be observed with texture quality set to High or even Medium. Therefore, the only way to avoid texture culling in this game is to turn off ray tracing and play with Medium or High textures. My advice would be to settle for Medium, as even in the rather non-demanding opening scene, I observed texture pop-in issues with the High texture quality preset.

Effectively, this means that even after modding in FSR4 to run at a lower internal resolution, the 8GB of VRAM on the 9060 XT still limits you from enabling RT - although the performance of the card is more than enough to handle it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

With FSR4 Quality upscaling at 1440P and high-ultra settings, Red Dead Redemption 2 runs flawlessly. The only potential pitfall with the experience is being locked into the DX12 API for FSR4; in some areas, such as Saint Denis, DX12 is well documented to cause performance issues such as stuttering, and therefore, Vulkan is preferable. Regardless, performance ranges between 70 - 90 FPS with near max settings, and image quality is noticeably better with FSR4 Quality than 1440P native TAA.

The game sometimes runs close to the 8GB VRAM buffer limit, but in my testing, it never actually exceeded it, or exhibited texture culling or pop-in. Via CapFrameX, the maximum GPU VRAM usage reported was 7.67GB, which perhaps indicates that the game is just barely fitting within the VRAM buffer. The periodic dips in the FPS graph you can see below don't correspond with the game filling VRAM, spilling out into memory, and flushing VRAM, as the same behavior was exhibited with texture quality set all the way down to medium. Rather, they are a well-documented phenomenon with DX12 in certain areas of the game.

A Plague Tale: Requiem

In A Plague Tale: Requiem, a title I've gotten halfway through with the 9060 XT 8GB, enabling RT is a mere pipedream for the 9060 XT 8GB. At 1440P with FSR4 quality enabled, max settings, RT enabled, and Ultra texture quality, the game immediately spills over to system memory, tanking performance to an 11 FPS average. Stepping texture quality down to High seems to work for the first few seconds, but as the game completely loads, performance drops rapidly from FPS in the high 40s to well below 20.

With texture quality at Medium, the game behaves similarly; the first 20-odd seconds of gameplay are a smooth 60+ FPS experience, but as the VRAM buffer gets saturated, performance tanks, dipping to the teens with massive stuttering. On the flip side, with no RT enabled, you're good to crank all settings (including texture quality) to the max and enjoy a constant 75+ FPS experience.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

In Expedition 33, the game stutters at 1440P Max settings with FSR4 Quality enabled (natively supported). However, using slightly tweaked settings, we can get an exceptional experience on the 9060 XT 8GB. By setting texture quality to medium and turning down shadows, foliage, and reflection from Epic to High, we see a significant reduction in VRAM usage, as the game lowers the draw-in distance for these elements significantly. This causes obvious pop-in, but I'd say it's an acceptable trade-off for a stutter-free experience.

With this configuration, we're able to maintain an average of 75 FPS, occasionally dipping down to 60 FPS when loading in new areas. VRAM usage peaks at 7.43 GB.

Conclusion - Turn RT off, set texture quality to medium, and you're golden!

So, was Ed right? Is the 9060 XT 8GB usable for the vast majority of games, at 1080P? Despite the poor performance in titles with RT enabled tested here, I'd be inclined to agree. Although the 9060 XT 8GB has decent RT performance in certain titles, the level of RT it can actually enable rarely yields any kind of transformative upgrade to graphics. For example, in Cyberpunk 2077, the 9060 XT 8GB can hold on to 60 FPS with RT medium lighting when not constrained by VRAM.

However, in my opinion, this hardly changes the way the game looks and therefore would not be worth it. This somewhat mitigates the painful truth that the 9060 XT 8GB cannot use ray tracing in many titles due to its nerfed 8GB VRAM capacity. Truth be told, throughout the time I've used this card, I've yet to come across a title where I couldn't tweak or mod FSR4 my way past the VRAM limitation, which, in my opinion, gets Ed's hot take the nod of approval.

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