🖼️ Computing
VRAM Requirements Calculator
Estimate how much VRAM a framebuffer, depth buffer, multisampling and texture set need at your resolution. Press Calculate.
About the VRAM Requirements Calculator
A framebuffer stores the colour of every pixel. At 1920 × 1080 with 32-bit colour, one buffer is about 8.3 MB. Double buffering doubles it; 4× MSAA multiplies the colour and depth storage by four; a depth buffer adds more. Textures, meshes and acceleration structures sit on top.
This is a lower-bound estimate, not a game's recommended VRAM. Modern engines stream textures, use compression and allocate caches that can be several gigabytes. Use the result to compare resolutions and settings, not to predict a specific game's usage.
How the calculation works
- Colour buffer (MB) = width × height × (bits ÷ 8) × buffers ÷ 1,000,000.
- Depth buffer (MB) = width × height × 4 × buffers ÷ 1,000,000.
- MSAA multiplies colour and depth storage by the sample count.
- Total = (colour + depth + textures) × (1 + overhead).
Reference values
| Resolution | Colour (32-bit, double) | Depth | 4× MSAA total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920 × 1080 | 16.6 MB | 8.3 MB | 99.5 MB |
| 2560 × 1440 | 29.5 MB | 14.7 MB | 176.9 MB |
| 3840 × 2160 | 66.4 MB | 33.2 MB | 398.1 MB |
| 5120 × 2880 | 117.9 MB | 59.0 MB | 707.6 MB |
Worked example: 1440p and 4K frame buffers
At 2560 × 1440 with 32-bit colour, one frame buffer is 2560 × 1440 × 4 = 14.75 MB. Double buffering is 29.5 MB; a 32-bit depth buffer adds 14.75 MB; 4× MSAA multiplies both by four, giving 177 MB before textures. A 4K frame buffer is 33.2 MB per buffer, or 66.4 MB double-buffered.
Those figures are the fixed cost of the render targets. Textures, meshes, shadow maps and acceleration structures sit on top and usually dominate. Use the result to compare resolutions and settings, not to predict a specific game's total VRAM use—engines stream and compress assets in ways a simple buffer calculation cannot capture.
Where video memory actually goes
Frame buffers are the easiest part to calculate and usually the smallest. Textures dominate: a 4K texture set with several material maps can occupy hundreds of megabytes, and a large open world may stream thousands of them. Shadow maps scale with the light's resolution and the number of cascades, and ray tracing adds acceleration structures plus denoising buffers on top.
That is why two games at the same resolution can differ by several gigabytes. It is also why dropping texture quality frees far more memory than dropping resolution, while dropping resolution helps frame rate more. Use a buffer calculation to compare settings, and the game's own memory indicator to find the real ceiling.