Popular games are increasingly requiring more video memory to run smoothly, which can cause performance degradation on older or low VRAM video cards. To work around this problem, the youtuber Paulo Gomes released a video in which he doubles the memory capacity of the GeForce RTX 3070 (8 GB).
The Europeian specialists showed the modification that involved a delicate process of replacing the 1 GB GDDR6 memory modules of the GeForce RTX 3070, in addition to adjustments in the electrical voltage components of the circuit so that the video card would recognize the new memory blocks that doubled its capacity to 16 GB.
At the beginning of the video, it is possible to observe that the frame rate per second drops as soon as the memory built into the video card reaches the limit of its capacity. In previous tests, the GeForce RTX 3070 performed worse than the GeForce RTX 3060 — a cheaper model and less powerful chip, but with more memory.
When comparing the performance of the video card in tests with resident Evil 4, it is possible to observe that, after the modification, the frame time stability had a significant improvement in resolution of 2560 x 1080 pixels. The minimum 0.1% FPS jumped from around just 7 FPS to over 50 FPS in some cases.
Another detail that can be observed is the memory consumption of the video card after the modification. In the first test, the game easily reached the limits of 8 GB, and after upgrading to 16 GB, the same title started to consume around 12 GB.
The modder didn’t need to make any changes to the PC’s BIOS. The graphics card even had a bug that caused the video to “flicker”, but this problem was quickly corrected by adjusting the power management settings in the NVIDIA driver, changing the “Normal” option to “Maximum performance preference”.
Modularity and ease of repair are not advantages that video cards available on the market boast, but it is not uncommon for hardware engineers to perform complex changes in the circuits of these components to experiment with new configurations that could improve their performance.
