YouTuber Paulo Gomes not too long ago revealed a video displaying how he modified a buyer’s RTX 3070, which was once one among Nvidia’s finest graphics playing cards, with 16GB of GDDR6 reminiscence. The modification resulted in critical efficiency enhancements within the extremely memory-intensive Resident Evil 4, the place the 16GB mod was performing 9x higher than the 8GB model within the 1% lows. (Leading to considerably smoother gaming efficiency.)
Not like earlier reminiscence mods we have seen on playing cards just like the RTX 2070, Gomes’ RTX 3070 mod required some further PCB work to get the 16GB reminiscence configuration working correctly. The modder needed to floor a number of the resistors on the PCB to trick the graphics card into supporting the higher-capacity reminiscence ICs which might be required to double the VRAM capability on the RTX 3070.
Apart from this mod, the reminiscence swap proceeded as standard. The modder eliminated the preliminary reminiscence chips that got here on the graphics card, cleaned the PCB, and put in new Samsung 2GB reminiscence ICs that may make up the brand new 16GB configuration. Apart from some preliminary flickering that was mounted by operating the GPU in high-performance mode from the Nvidia Management Panel, the cardboard carried out completely with the brand new modifications.
The extra 8GB of VRAM proved to be extraordinarily helpful in boosting the RTX 3070’s efficiency in Resident Evil 4. The modder examined the sport with each the unique 8GB configuration and the modified 16GB configuration and located large enhancements within the card’s 0.1% and 1% lows. The unique card was working at only one (sure one) FPS 1% low and 0.1% FPS lows, whereas the 16GB card operated with 60 and 40 FPS respectively. Common body charges additionally went up, from 54 to 71 FPS.
This resulted in an enormous improve to the general gaming expertise on the 16GB RTX 3070. The considerably increased .1% and 1% lows meant that the sport was barely hitching in any respect, and efficiency was buttery clean. The 8GB conversely had large micro stuttering points that may final for a big period of time in a number of areas of the sport.
It is attention-grabbing to see what this mod has executed for the RTX 3070, and it reveals the potential of what such a GPU may do with 2023’s newest AAA titles when it is not bottlenecked by video reminiscence. This is a matter that has plagued Nvidia’s 8GB RTX 30 collection GPUs for a while now, particularly the more-powerful RTX 3070 Ti, the place the 8GB body buffer shouldn’t be sufficiently big to run 2023’s newest AAA titles easily at excessive or ultra-quality settings.