NVIDIA RTX 3070 features a physical memory capacity switch
A video from Casual Gamers shows a graphics card NVIDIA would never make.
Paulo Gomes team and Casual Gamers have teamed up for an interesting project. Brazilian modders have been making some crazy alterations to GeForce and Radeon GPUs lately, and it looks like they made another RTX 30 card with more memory. Only this card has a physical toggle switch for 8GB or 16GB setting.
Of course, such a graphics card makes no sense to gamers, at least the switch doesn’t. A modded card with 16GB capacity is all they need, but the switch still has a purpose. This could be a very convenient way for reviewers to change memory settings. Maybe this is just how some RTX 4060 Ti will end up looking once the 16GB version is released?
MSI RTX 3070 with memory switch, Source: Casual Gamers
As for the card, it’s MSI Ventus 2X model that has been upgraded with higher capacity modules. The switch probably shorts the necessary pins and switches between two BIOSes to make this all work. This is not the first project with modded memory, but how exactly does this look under the cooler is not clear because there are no photos. However, just to get a better understanding, we covered a similar RTX 3070 mod here.
As noted by the reviewer, additional frame buffer makes a noticeable difference for the slowest frames (1% and 0.1% low). The average framerate has improved as well, but the difference is not as significant. Doubled memory capacity has resulted in less stutter in games such as The Last of Us at 1440p Ultra settings, which was noted by other reviewers to be very memory intensive.
MSI RTX 3070 with memory switch in games, Source: Casual Gamers
The results will vary depending on game settings. The card is more likely to hit an 8GB limit by using Ultra presents with ray tracing, but in some cases, even the 16GB VRAM did not make any difference (Forza Horizon 5 or Cyberpunk 2077 running RT Overdrive profile). We have only added two graphs from the video, so make sure to check the full review below (it is recorded in English):
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