upgrading your main system memory is a piece of cake you buy a ddr module you
slot it in and enjoy but have you ever wondered why you can't
do that with video RAM on your graphics card this is a fair question especially
considering how much vram modern games can require you see vram stores textures
and other visual assets that the GPU processes in order to render all those
lovely frames that appear on your screen and as games have gotten more advanced
these visual assets take up lots of room especially if you're gaming at high
resolutions or high settings and not only that but because of how fast your
GPU has to spit out all those frames it needs access to the information in vram
oh boy very quickly
additionally graphics rendering is a highly parallelized process
which means your GPU's architecture is built to work on several data streams at
once you can learn more about that right up here but the bottom line is that vram
has a lot more bandwidth than your main system RAM for example a one Gigabyte
gddr6x chip has a transfer rate of around 84 gigabytes per second compared
to ddr4 3200 which is only about 26
gigabytes per second all the speed is actually a huge reason why you can't
just add more vram you see the high bandwidth necessitates a large number of
physical connections for example think about how many pins your CPU uses to
both move data and ensure it has a sufficiently stable power supply to do
so but there's only so much room on a typical graphics card so instead of
having a big old socket like motherboards do manufacturers instead
solder vram modules directly to the graphics card pcb to save space and some
types of video memory such as hbm are actually combined on the same package as
the GPU itself not only does this take up less real estate but it also cuts
down on the risk of data errors you see moving all that data around at such high
speeds introduces the possibility of errors kind of like how trying to type
really fast means that you're likely to make more spelling mistakes soldering
vram chips directly on the board and integrating them tightly with a GPU is
not only cheaper than engineering a socket or slot that an end user can add
vram to but it also removes a layer of complexity that could result in more
data errors although there were some older graphics cards from way back in
the day where you could slot in more vram the amount of speed you need these
days means it just isn't practical anymore and even if you just tried to
solder a higher capacity vram chip onto your graphics card there's a chance
a pretty high chance it wouldn't work due to the card's firmware being
specifically tuned for the vram configuration it's shipped with not to
mention you'd probably end up breaking your expensive GPU so just i wouldn't
risk it but even though games are requiring more vram than ever the
culprit of poor performance is much more often an underpowered GPU rather than
insufficient vram so if you're having weird slowdowns or crashes in a game
you're playing do a bit of research and see if you really need a higher tier GPU
rather than just more vram and if you're using an integrated GPU not a discrete
graphics card like this one those solutions actually use part of your main
system memory as vram so if you find yourself running low you can go into
your computer's BIOS and increase the amount that's allocated for video memory
man if only it were possible to just download more vram like you can with
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