Paulo Gomes, already mentioned talked about is at it again. The modder is a compulsive VRAM welder on graphics cards. As soon as he sees a GPU with 8 GB of memory, he upgrades it to 16 GB. Obviously, we’re exaggerating, but we can’t help noticing that he does some particularly interesting work. His latest success: soldering 16 GB of VRAM onto an RTX 3070 and installing a switch to switch the card from 8 GB to 16 GB of memory.
Casual Gamers received the card and decided to test it in real-life conditions. What’s the difference between an 8 GB card and a 16 GB card?
RTX 3070: more VRAM = greater stability!
So, in concrete terms, what impact does memory have on the card’s gaming performance? Clearly, having a large memory capacity means greater framerate stability. The other positive effect, if the game saturates the original 8 GB, is to increase its average frame/sec.
As we’ve seen with Last of Us and Resident Evil 4 Remake, going from 8 GB to 16 GB does a world of good. With 16 GB, framerate drops and micro-stuttering are drastically reduced. In-game sensations are better, with greater fluidity.
However, on games that don’t completely saturate the card’s memory, the addition of VRAM doesn’t make much difference. On Cyberpunk 2077 or Forza Horizon 5, where memory usage varies between 6.1 GB and 6.7 GB for the former and 7.8 GB for the latter, there’s no noticeable change.
In any case, given the tendency of the latest games to pump your graphics card’s memory, the best thing to do, if your purse allows it, is to opt for a card with at least 12 GB of memory for peace of mind… For a while.
