When I am playing free-roam or anything, I get a lot of stuttering, gets worse the faster I accelerate, GPU usage goes up (low settings).
But in the benchmark everything is fine (high settings)
Brief testing on the High preset on my machine used 3.4GB VRAM in the benchmark and over 3.7GB simply spawning into freeroam. The game likely intelligently loads into VRAM based on how much you have. I.e., because my card has more than 3GB, and uses more than 3GB on the same settings, doesn’t mean your machine should struggle, though it might use all of the available VRAM all the time.
I did also see total system RAM usage of right around 8GB. No background processes other than Logitech software and Networx. If the game is shuffling things back to RAM more often due to limited VRAM on your system, you could be limited by system RAM as game assets start being loaded in and out of RAM from the storage drive’s pagefile. I upgraded from 8 to 16 last year, knowing it would help with a few games. I was surprised how many programs were happy to use more when more is there. 8 is not enough for semi-intensive use these days.
TL;DR Lower your settings until it runs or upgrade to 16GB system RAM. Prices are about back to normal these days…