Video memory behaves differently depending on what you ask of it, and the difference is not a matter of degree — it is a difference in kind.

Games degrade. Models refuse.

In a game, running short of video memory is a performance problem. The system spills data across to system memory, which is dramatically slower, and you feel it as stutter and sudden frame drops rather than a crash. Turn the textures down and the problem goes away. It is unpleasant, but it is a dial you can turn.

Running a language model locally is binary. The weights either fit in video memory or they do not. If they do not, you either offload layers to system memory and watch throughput collapse by an order of magnitude, or the load fails outright. There is no equivalent of turning down the textures.

This is why buying advice written for gaming translates so badly to AI work, and why a card that is comfortable at high resolution can be useless for a model that a much cheaper card with more memory handles fine.