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A RTX 3070 Modded With 16GB VRAM Proved It Needs More VRAM
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A RTX 3070 Modded With 16GB VRAM Proved It Needs More VRAM

by Low Boon ShenApril 25, 2023
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A RTX 3070 Modded With 16GB VRAM Proved It Needs More VRAM

In retrospect, 8GB simply wasn’t enough to handle the latest titles at maximum settings, even if the silicon itself could.

A RTX 3070 Modded With 16GB VRAM Proved It Needs More VRAM

Brazilian YouTuber Paulo Gomes recently published a video with a modified version of NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 that he himself worked on. This particular customer unit has its VRAM doubled from 8GB to 16GB and with it brings some pretty significant performance boosts.

To mod this card, it’s not just a simple DRAM chip swap: before that Gomes has to ground some specific resistors in order to trick the GPU into supporting 16Gbit memory chips instead of the default 8Gbit ICs. After that, the usual process goes – desolder the old ones, and in comes the new Samsung 16Gbit (2GB) memory ICs which totals in 16GB of VRAM. The card subsequently fired up normally aside from minor flickering issue that is solved by simply switching to high-performance mode.

A RTX 3070 Modded With 16GB VRAM Proved It Needs More VRAM 24

So what does all these extra VRAM capacity equate to? For VRAM-hungry games like Resident Evil 4, the improvement is substantial. In it’s original 8GB configuration, the game is shown running at just one frame per second on both 1% and 0.1% lows (effectively stuttering). That number gets boosted to 60FPS on 1% low and 40FPS 0.1% low with the new 16GB VRAM installed, and even the average framerate increased as well.

In retrospect, 8GB VRAM is too little for modern games these days – as many titles can often breach that limit when the graphics effects gets cranked high enough (regardless of resolution). It’s part of the reason why AMD offers more VRAM in comparison to NVIDIA’s equivalents, and cases like this may gave RX 6000 series cards more advantage against RTX 30 series GPUs thanks to its bigger pool of video memory at disposal.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Pokdepinion: 12GB would’ve made more sense for the RTX 3070 – though I guess either a 192-bit or 384-bit bus just don’t quite make sense in performance and cost respectively (RTX 40’s a larger L2 cache likely alleviates this issue). 

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Low Boon Shen
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