The Last of Us Part 2 proves that 8 GB of VRAM can be enough, even at 4K with maximum settings, so why aren't more games using the same clever asset-streaming trick?

A screenshot of the PC version of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered.

When Sony's masterpiece The Last of Us Part 1 appeared on the humble PC two years ago, I hoped it would become a watershed moment in the history of console ports. Well, it was, but for all the wrong reasons—buggy and unstable, it hogged your CPU and GPU like nothing else, and most controversially of all, it tried to eat up way more VRAM than your graphics card has. It's fair to say that TLOU1's watershed moment cemented the whole '8 GB of VRAM isn't enough' debate.

Most of those issues were eventually resolved via a series of patches, but like so many big-budget, mega-graphics games, if you fire it up at 4K on Ultra settings, the game will happily let you use more VRAM than you actually have. The TLOU1 screenshot below is from a test rig using an RTX 3060 Ti, with 8 GB of memory, showing the built-in performance HUD; I've confirmed that RAM usage figure with other tools and the game is indeed trying to use around 10 GB of VRAM.