Still deliberating on buying a 16” MBP. Not sure on the 4GB VRAM difference. What happens when the GPU memory is used up when running an app? Does the computer default to the regular system RAM? I like to play games on max settings and high res, and perhaps in clamshell mode outputting to a 4K screen.
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MBP 16 AMD 5500M 4GB vs 8GB
- Thread starter bniu
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No matter what amount of VRAM you have, you're not going to game at max settings 4K on a 5500M I can tell you that right away. You can barely do that on an RX 5700XT.
I don't think playing games at sensible settings will push past the 4GB VRAM on the GPU to be honest. You can find use cases that can use the VRAM but I don't think gaming will have you bottlenecked at VRAM. You'll hit other limits before that.
On my 2014 iMac, I had the R9 M295X with 4GB of VRAM, and of course it's an entirely different GPU architecture and such, but I can tell you that 4GB never was the limiting factor for me with that GPU. Civ VI 4K, Batman Arkham Knight 1440p, XCOM 1440p and so on. Now at the end my R9 M295X was burning to death and had to under clock itself tremendously and was still cooking; Had to play Sekiro at 720p. You can probably get away with higher settings, but I still doubt you'll hit a VRAM limit, really.
Well said. As far as gaming is concerned, 8GB is wasted on the RP 5500M. It may be of benefit in serious video editing workloads, but not strictly for gaming. The 5500M will choke to death trying to run recent-ish games at max settings at 4K resolution way before you bump into the VRAM limit.
Thanks all, I ended up just getting the 5500M 4GB GPU. I figure if I need more, an eGPU is an option. I suppose now with TB3, eGPU is an option that was not available before.
Hard to believe for me that when the 16" MBP came out, I thought I'd be getting 2.3 i9/64GB RAM/8GB 5500M/4TB SSD for north of $4500. Now with all this deliberation, I end up getting 2.3 i9/32GB RAM/4GB 5500M/1TB SSD refurbished for less than $3000.
I guess it pays to go through my Photos library and really dig through what needs to and what does not need to be there. Cleared out about 60% of my photo library. Those 36MP DSLR burst shots sure add up!!!
Hard to believe for me that when the 16" MBP came out, I thought I'd be getting 2.3 i9/64GB RAM/8GB 5500M/4TB SSD for north of $4500. Now with all this deliberation, I end up getting 2.3 i9/32GB RAM/4GB 5500M/1TB SSD refurbished for less than $3000.
I guess it pays to go through my Photos library and really dig through what needs to and what does not need to be there. Cleared out about 60% of my photo library. Those 36MP DSLR burst shots sure add up!!!
I keep seeing everyone saying for gaming you don't need more than 4GB, but I've seen more than one of my games use well over 5GB when I turn up options and run at 1080p. No, it didn't use the full 8, but at just under 6, certainly the 4GB of the base card would have caused some bottlenecking.