Monday, April 24th 2023
Modded NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 With 16 GB of VRAM Shows Impressive Performance Uplift
A memory mod for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 that doubles the amount of VRAM showed some impressive performance gains, especially in the most recent games. While the mod was more complicated than earlier ones, since it required some additional PCB soldering, the one tested game shows incredible performance boost, especially in the 1%, 0.1% lows, and the average frame rate.
Modding the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 to 16 GB VRAM is not a bad idea, since NVIDIA already planned a similar card (RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB), but eventually cancelled it. With today games using more than 8 GB of VRAM, it means that some RTX 30 series graphics card can struggle with pushing playable FPS. The modder benchmarked the new Resident Evil 4 at very high settings, showing that those additional 8 GB of VRAM is the difference between stuttering and smooth gameplay.
As said, the recent mod is a bit more complicated than the earlier one done on some earlier graphics cards, as some resistors needed to be grounded in order to support higher-capacity memory ICs, and the modded graphics card had to be set to high-performance mode in the NVIDIA Control Panel, in order to fix flickering.
AMD marketing has recently called out NVIDIA and pulled the VRAM card, but with NVIDIA launching the GeForce RTX 4070 with 12 GB of VRAM, it appears this won't change anytime soon. These mods show that there is definitely the need for more VRAM, at least in some games.
Sources:
Paulo Gomes (Youtube), via Videocardz
Modding the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 to 16 GB VRAM is not a bad idea, since NVIDIA already planned a similar card (RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB), but eventually cancelled it. With today games using more than 8 GB of VRAM, it means that some RTX 30 series graphics card can struggle with pushing playable FPS. The modder benchmarked the new Resident Evil 4 at very high settings, showing that those additional 8 GB of VRAM is the difference between stuttering and smooth gameplay.
AMD marketing has recently called out NVIDIA and pulled the VRAM card, but with NVIDIA launching the GeForce RTX 4070 with 12 GB of VRAM, it appears this won't change anytime soon. These mods show that there is definitely the need for more VRAM, at least in some games.
80 Comments on Modded NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 With 16 GB of VRAM Shows Impressive Performance Uplift
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So much misunderstanding in this thread, its frustrating how misinformed people are.
Allocation is utilisation as VRAM cannot be over committed.
In addition a game might run on less VRAM, but that doesnt mean there is no penalty in doing so, many modern engines now dynamically adjust quality to manage VRAM, as well as things like textures staying loaded, draw distance etc. also been affected.
I can play FF7 remake on a 10 gig GPU (just about), does that mean 10 gig is enough for the game? well yeah if you ok with stuttering, frequent texture/asset swapping, low quality textures due to LOD been reduced dynamically and the occasional crash.
The amount it uses is dynamic, the game detects the hardware and auto configures a VRAM budget. A feature available to any UE4 game.
I ended up doing a combination of setting shadows to low quality and various manual UE4 tweaks. Also launching the game in DX11 mode lowers the impact of asset swapping.
In addition launching it on defaults, with GPU accelerated apps running (discord, browsers etc.) caused it to crash without "out of VRAM errors", as it makes the assumption it doesnt have to share VRAM with anything else on the system on its auto budget.
More Vram is always better for the same price, no matter what, being it for gaming or work applications, and at $500+ you should have plenty, not barely enough.
Also there is only so much you can do turning down settings when stuff related to gameplay itself is asking for Vram (NPC AI, geometry, view distance etc.).
So even if you are happy paying $500 to play at 1080p low settings (for whatever reason) you will soon find yourself limited in the games you can play.That doesn't mean the GPU is allocating those resources for no reason, I don't get how that's still not clear.
Also if you see 7.4GB utilizzation (or allocation) on a 8GB card, you are running out of Vram, you won't see 8GB or the game would just crash.
Microstutter is not the only sign of running out of Vram, immage quality degradation is actually the most common, but one many won't notice (that show how few are actually able to tell the difference between "ultra" vs low or even RT on Vs RT off