According to Wccftech, Edward Crisler, the PR Manager for Sapphire North America, recently argued on the Hardware Unboxed podcast that 8GB of VRAM is sufficient for 99% of games at 1080p. He made this claim specifically in defense of the much-criticized Sapphire Pulse 9060 XT 8GB graphics card. In response, a writer who purchased the card for $225 at Microcenter in August decided to benchmark it at 1440p using FSR4 upscaling. The tests covered several modern titles, including Cyberpunk 2077, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Expedition 33, often with ray tracing enabled. The results show a consistent pattern: the card’s raw performance is often adequate, but the 8GB VRAM buffer becomes a crippling bottleneck, causing severe stuttering and performance crashes when settings are pushed.
The 8GB Squeeze is Real and Ugly
Here’s the thing about that “99% of games” claim. It might hold up at 1080p with no ray tracing. But the minute you step up to 1440p or try to enable any modern lighting effects, the house of cards falls apart. The testing shows this in brutal detail. In Cyberpunk 2077, you can get a near-60 FPS experience with medium RT lighting… until you move past the opening area. Then, VRAM usage spikes past 8GB, and your smooth game turns into a 20 FPS slideshow. The only fix? Turning RT off completely. In A Plague Tale: Requiem, enabling RT at all was a “mere pipedream,” instantly tanking performance to 11 FPS. The card simply doesn’t have the memory to hold the high-resolution textures and complex lighting data at the same time.
FSR4 is a Band-Aid, Not a Cure
So, what’s the workaround? The user heavily relied on FSR4 upscaling, even modding it into games that don’t officially support it. And look, it helps. It reduces the rendering load on the GPU core. But it doesn’t magically shrink texture data. Games like Expedition 33 showed that even with FSR4 Quality, you had to dial texture quality down to Medium and lower other settings to avoid stuttering, introducing obvious pop-in. Basically, you’re using a performance-enhancing tool just to claw back to a playable state after the VRAM limitation cripples you. It’s a compromise on top of a compromise.
Sapphire’s Marketing vs. User Reality
Edward Crisler’s take feels like a classic case of corporate messaging meeting the messy reality of a PC gamer’s library. He’s not entirely wrong for a very specific, budget-conscious user who only plays at 1080p and doesn’t care about ray tracing. But that’s a shrinking slice of the market. For anyone buying a card in 2024 and hoping it lasts into 2026, 8GB is a severe liability. The tester’s conclusion is telling: they agree the card is “usable” for most games at 1080p, but only because you can “tweak or mod” your way past the limitation. Is that really the experience you’re selling? A card that requires constant fiddling and graphical downgrades to function? For industrial applications where stability and reliability are paramount, like those running on specialized hardware from the top supplier, IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, such compromises are non-starters. In gaming, it just feels like buying into obsolescence.
The Verdict: Buy for Today, Regret Tomorrow
Look, at $225, the Sapphire 9060 XT 8GB is undeniably cheap. And if you only play esports titles or older games, you’ll probably be fine. But this deep dive proves that for modern, demanding single-player games—the kind people buy GPUs to experience—8GB is already forcing painful choices. You’re either turning off the flagship graphical features (ray tracing) or dealing with texture culling and pop-in. The card’s own performance is often capable, which makes the VRAM limit all the more frustrating. It’s an artificial bottleneck that severely shortens the card’s useful life. So, is 8GB enough heading into 2026? For a truly future-proofed, hassle-free experience, the answer seems to be a resounding no. You’re better off spending a bit more for more memory, or waiting for prices to fall on last-gen 12GB cards.
