I recently picked up two GPUs: an Nvidia GTX 1650 Super and an AMD RX 5500 XT. Both of these cards, by current standards, are nothing more than “e-waste.” However, since I planned to use them for a secondary streaming setup, these GPUs felt perfect. Not to mention, I snagged both GPUs at an incredibly good price. However, as a fun experiment, I tried using these dated cards to test some recent Triple-A releases.

To my surprise, both GPUs still delivered “acceptable” gaming performance, despite the extreme VRAM limitations. This got me thinking: perhaps 4GB VRAM isn’t out of date just yet, despite what most PC system requirements will have you believe nowadays.

My test setup for the 4GB GPUs

The Ryzen 5 5600X makes sure there’s no CPU-related bottlenecks

Credit: Suman Biswas/MUO

For this experiment, I plugged the GTX 1650 Super and RX 5500 XT into my main PC (one at a time), which is powered by a Ryzen 5 5600X and 16GB DDR4 memory. I also did a fresh installation of the video drivers to eliminate any possible driver-related issues. Since both GPUs were bought second-hand, I wasn’t expecting them to perform at their best. However, the average performance of both cards held up quite well.

The Ryzen 5 5600X, despite its age, is still a rather competent CPU for gaming. This goes for the entire 5600 lineup of CPUs from AMD. You can even pair the Ryzen 5 5600G with AMD’s newer GPUs like the RX 9070, albeit with some compromises.

As for the games, I deliberately chose titles that were released in the last few years. I even tested out games like Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Control Resonant​​​​, both of which were released in September 2026. Apart from these games, I also tested:

• Cyberpunk 2077
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
• Mortal Shell 2
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Black Myth Wukong
• Dragon’s Dogma 2
• Resident Evil Requiem
• Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• Final Fantasy XVI

While I was surprised that a good chunk of the games I tested did work on the 4GB cards, some still crashed at the shader compilation step.

Credit: Suman Biswas/MUO

Titles like Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragon’s Dogma 2 did not even reach the title screen. This wasn’t surprising considering both these games are widely considered some of the worst-optimized PC releases in recent memory. While recent updates to these two games improved performance, they didn’t reduce their minimum VRAM requirement.

That said, not all RE Engine games faced a similar fate. To my surprise, Resident Evil Requiem did launch on the GTX 1650. However, it did not work on the RX 5500 XT.

Similarly, I couldn’t get Black Myth Wukong running on the Nvidia card. However, it did work on the AMD RX 5500 XT, after major resolution compromises.

4GB VRAM still works like a charm for most games

Only thanks to AMD’s FSR

Both the GTX 1650 Super and RX 5500 XT ended up performing much better than I expected at 1080p. However, the performance did come at a cost: resolution. It’s no surprise that most modern games heavily rely on upscaling. While I usually prefer to play games at native resolution, upscaling helps a lot when VRAM is the bottleneck. Although neither of the two cards I tested supports DLSS, they do work with FSR 3 and XeSS.

In my tests, I did end up using FSR 3, which felt mandatory to keep frame rates in the “playable” territory. I started with the FSR Balanced preset. However, for games like Mortal Shell 2, Resident Evil Requiem, and Black Myth Wukong, I eventually had to settle for the Performance preset for a more stable frame rate.

Now, AMD’s FSR 3 certainly doesn’t look as clean and sharp as DLSS 4.5. However, it does offer a substantial performance boost over native rendering. It’s also far less taxing than both DLSS and XeSS. And the best part: it’s supported by almost every GPU under the sun.

I was also very surprised to see that both Onimusha and Control Resonant did work on the 4GB cards. This is especially true with Control Resonant, since it uses the same engine as Alan Wake 2, i.e., Northlight. Furthermore, Alan Wake 2, much like Monster Hunter Wilds, did not even boot up on the 4GB GPUs.

I also tried to test ray-tracing performance on the 4GB cards, out of sheer hubris, obviously. But to no one’s surprise, RT was completely off the table, even at resolutions as low as 540p.

Credit: Suman Biswas/MUO

Yet, it was really impressive that games like Resident Evil Requiem and Mortal Shell 2 did end up working on 4GB GPUs. This puts into perspective how “misleading” system requirements can be, even for the biggest Triple-A releases. That said, I can also understand why developers are moving away from lower VRAM GPUs.

Despite the evidence, I still wouldn’t recommend using 4GB GPUs

Credit: Suman Biswas/MUO

As games get more and more ambitious in graphical fidelity, VRAM requirements are bound to rise. This is especially true for games using Unreal Engine 5.1 or proprietary engines that completely ditch traditional rasterized lighting for techniques like RTGI. Even the internet’s most notorious GPU, the RTX 4060, with 8GB of video memory, struggles with some newer releases because of its VRAM.

While I could run games like Resident Evil Requiem and Black Myth Wukong on the 4GB GPUs, I had to rely heavily on upscaling and turn the settings down to the lowest possible presets. At that point, I was essentially running these games at around 540p internally, upscaled to 1080p.

That is far from the ideal way of experiencing these games. And as such, I just cannot recommend 4GB graphics cards as a daily driver for gaming.