What if NVIDIA made RTX 3070 with 16GB?
Paulo Gomes and his friends came up with a new idea to upgrade NVIDIA’s last-gen RTX 3070 GPU memory.
RTX 3070 with 16GB VRAM, Source: Paulo Gomes
Memory mods on graphics cards are nothing new these days. Modders and technicians have been doing this for years, and memory replacements are among the most common jobs performed on faulty video cards. However, by replacing the memory and grounding some resistors on the PCB, it is possible to trick the card into supporting a different memory altogether. In this case, with twice the capacity.
The only downside of using this mod is the necessity to change GPU settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel. As it turns out, GPUs that are modded this way tend to show errors (flickering or black screens) unless they are set to high-performance 3D mode. However, once this is done and the graphics card can support this type of memory, there should be no major drawbacks.
RTX 3070 with 16GB VRAM, Source: Paulo Gomes
Since there are no changes to the GPU itself, it still carries the same PCI ID, meaning that all drivers should work and update with no issues as well. The upgrade requires special hardware and, no doubt, extensive knowledge. Especially when custom GPUs are considered like in this case (the mod is on an MSI card).
Paulo decided to test the card with the Resident Evil 4 remake at very high settings, which struggled with 8GB VRAM limit before. This is no longer the case and the memory allocation can now go beyond 8GB (as shown even up to 11GB). Furthermore, the framerate, especially for 1% and 0.1% lows, has increased substantially.
RTX 3070 with 16GB VRAM vs. 8GB VRAM, Source: Paulo Gomes
Of course, this type of comparison is far from what one would consider a proper review, but this quick comparison clearly shows that RTX 3070 would be more than capable of such high graphics settings had it been equipped with 16GB VRAM originally.
The RTX 3070 series with 16GB VRAM is nothing new, though. This is a quick reminder to our readers that NVIDIA planned 3070 Ti 16GB around 2 years ago, but this card was eventually cancelled. Something that only sounded like a crazy rumor, has later found its confirmation in an engineering sample leak. The new RTX 4070 series is only available with 12GB VRAM. There is likely no plan to double the capacity on this model, but who knows what modders may eventually come up with.
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