If you have a 8gb card i'd just recommend playing at 1080p.
I'm playing at 1080p with a mix of High and Ultra settings, with Enviroment textures set to High, and all the other texture settings set to Ultra, and i'm averaging only around 0.5gb more vram usage compared to Alex -
Imo textures are argubaly one of, if not the biggest, factor in terms of how good a game looks. So yeah i'd rather play at 1080p with good textures to be honest.
You can push high textures at 1440p or 4K DLSS balanced/performance
- Disable hardware accerelation for Steam (400-600 mb vram saved, boom)
- If you're on Epic tough luck. It will always use upwards of 350 mb vram. more so if you're at 1440p or 4K
- Kill dwm.exe to reset bloated VRAM usage for desktop compositor
- Turn off all background applications that use hardware accerelation (or turn hw accerelation off for them), Such as discord, chrome or stuff. or simply turn them off. up to you.
Result;
Native1440p
1440p dlssquality , mostly locked 60 fps operation. very rare hitches here and there
4k dlss perf high textures , locked 50 fps operation
If you can make the game use 7400-7500 mb; ignore the 1.6 GB part. Not many stutters or problems, aside from the ones happen when specific actions happen, or a new map is loaded.
If you can get the game to use 7400 7600 mb vram, you will be able to play 1440p/high textures or 4k dlss high textures (only visual effects and volumetrics set to low. these two are crucial.)
You can see my exact settings in the video as well.
In the irvideo, VRAM is only used per dedicated 6.4 gb and total 7.2 gb. if you do background optimizations, you can make the game use 7.4-7.6 gb and total 7.9-8 GB.
8 GB is not stranded to medium textures. Just use an appopriate framecap based on your CPU capabilities and that will iron out most of the problems. (I use 48-50 FPS cap usually)
IDEALLY, you can reduce your IDLE VRAM usage to 250-300 mb on a 1440p screen. If you can do that, YOU CAN SAFELY PUSH 7400 mb worth of "game application" usage in game. DF thinks game stutters or crashes when you go past the threshold, but it never happens with me. There are slight hitches here and there but as I said, most of them go away with a frame cap (gotta be a bit aggresive here, I have to admit). But no crashes. I'm literally near the end, played at 4K/DLSS perf GAME APPLICATION at 7600 MB VRAM usage, only had 4 crashes in 12 hours.