Control can use up to 18.5GB VRAM in 8K mode

TechPowerUp writes Remedy Entertainment's new Control video game uses a shit ton of resources. When running in DirectX 12 mode with NVIDIA RTX enabled, using the highest quality image settings and a resolution of 8K, the game can gobble up as much as 18.5GB of video memory. This makes it one of the heaviest games to date, but a large part of it is due to the use of the 8K resolution.

At a more "reasonable" resolution of 4K, the game still uses 8.1GB of video memory. This means even cards with 8GB VRAM are starting to fall short these days.

When a game needs more video memory than your graphics card has, Windows has an elaborate memory management system that sheds some of that memory onto your system's main memory, and the swap file progressively (at reduced performance, of course). Video memory usage drops like a rock between 8K and 4K UHD (which is 1/4th the pixels as 8K). With all RTX features enabled and other settings maxed out, "Control" only uses 8.1 GB of video memory. What this also means is that video cards with just 8 GB of memory are beginning fall short of what it takes to game at 4K.

Overall, it's not really relevant as you can't actually play the game at enjoyable framerates with RTX and 8K resolution turned on, but it's still an interesting bit of trivia.