With the announcement earlier this week by NVIDIA of a video card with 24GB of VRAM, which is targeted specifically at the high end graphics and render market along with live VR stitching, competitor AMD has a high hurdle to jump to stay in the game. Considering many large studios like Framestore run NVIDIA exclusively, AMD needs to not only meet but fly well over the hurdle to make a dent in the pro market. With the new Pro SSG, they just might.
Video Ram is hugely important for video rendering since the processing goes much faster if the image can be buffered in the card's onboard storage. With the increasingly data-intense footage formats filmmakers are using (8K video, for instance), cards need more on-board memory to load the footage and then process it quickly. For example, some VFX workflows are now up around 50GB per frame, way beyond what even the top end NVIDIA cards can load into memory easily. Since VRAM is generally pretty expensive, making a card with something like 128GB hasn't yet been cost-effective.
