24GB vs 48GB vs 96GB VRAM: How Much Do VFX Renders Actually Need?

How much VRAM do VFX renders actually need? For most VFX work, 24 GB is enough once your textures are tiled and your geometry is instanced. It comfortably handles complex lighting, lookdev, and moderate volumetrics. 48 GB earns its price when you render heavy volumetric sequences, full resolution displacement, and large sims without wanting to optimise or split anything. 96 GB is film and studio territory, for single frames so dense that paging to RAM would be too slow. The catch most spec sheets hide is that VRAM need is not fixed. The same shot can need 30 GB built one way and 18 GB built another, so workflow often decides the tier more than the project does.

Hardware pages are built to make you reach for the bigger number. The 48 GB card is right there next to the 24 GB one, and it feels safer to buy headroom. Sometimes that is right. A lot of the time it is money spent on VRAM you will never fill, because the scene that supposedly needed it just needed tidier construction. So before you size up, it helps to know what each tier really buys.

What Each Tier Comfortably Handles

VRAM	Comfortably handles	Who actually needs it
24 GB	Lookdev, complex lighting, moderate volumes, instanced geo, tiled textures	Most freelancers and small studio VFX shots
48 GB	Heavy volumetric sequences, full displacement, large sims with no splitting	Artists doing dense FX daily who do not want to optimise per shot
96 GB+	Film scale single frames too dense for out of core to stay fast	Studios on high end feature and episodic work

Notice the jumps are not even in value. Going from 24 to 48 GB removes a lot of daily friction for FX heavy artists. Going from 48 to 96 GB serves a much narrower group, mostly people whose single frames are genuinely enormous. For the average VFX freelancer, 24 GB plus good habits covers more than the marketing suggests, and our guide to fixing GPU out of memory shows how far those habits stretch a card.

You Do Not Have to Own the Big Card

The other thing the buying question misses is that you can rent the VRAM only when a project needs it. A 24 GB cloud GPU costs a fraction of a 48 GB workstation card and is there the day you need it. iRender rents a dedicated RTX 4090 with 24 GB and 256 GB of system RAM, the RAM pool being what stretches the 24 GB, since out of core paging stays fast.

The number to be clear eyed about before you size anything: iRender’s cards top out at 24 GB, full stop. A single frame that truly needs 40 GB or more of contiguous VRAM will not clear that on raw VRAM, and you are into out of core or a genuinely higher VRAM card from another source. For the large majority of VFX shots that sit at or below 24 GB once optimised, renting per project beats owning a card that idles between jobs. Pricing, the first deposit bonus, and how the rental model works are in the iRender explainer, and if you would rather have a farm handle submission entirely, the farm comparison lays out the SaaS options including the CPU strong farms that sidestep VRAM altogether.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is 24GB of VRAM enough for VFX rendering?

For most VFX work, yes, once textures are tiled and geometry is instanced. 24 GB comfortably covers complex lighting, lookdev, and moderate volumetrics. You exceed it mainly with heavy volumetric sequences, full resolution displacement, or large unoptimised sims, where out of core rendering or a higher VRAM card takes over. How a scene is built changes the number a lot.

When is a 48GB GPU actually worth it?

When you render dense FX every day and do not want to optimise or split scenes per shot. The jump from 24 to 48 GB removes real daily friction for that workflow. For occasional heavy shots, renting a 24 GB cloud GPU when needed is usually cheaper than owning a 48 GB card that sits idle most of the time.

Can I avoid buying a high-VRAM card altogether?

Often yes. Tiling textures, instancing, capping displacement, and using out of core rendering stretch a 24 GB card a long way. Beyond that, rent a cloud GPU only when a project demands it, or use a CPU strong render farm that runs on system RAM rather than VRAM. Owning a large card makes sense mainly for constant daily heavy demand.

See more: Out of VRAM on a Complex VFX Scene? How to Render It Anyway