the focal point of any graphics card once you get past the RGB lighting of
course is the GPU itself which does all the
number crunching that pushes the frames of your favorite games to your screen
but an often overlooked component is your video memory which typically takes
the form of these small modules surrounding the GPU if you take off the
cooler the memory stores visual assets like textures and other information that
the GPU needs to process to render a finished frame and like gpus video
memory or vram gets a boost in speed and performance every so often and today
we're going to tell you about the latest newest boost a type of vram called
gddr6x gddr6x is set to be the successor to
gddr6 and the older gddr5 family on high-end
graphics cards although plain gddr6 without the x is actually a fairly
recent innovation with both the rtx 2000 series from NVIDIA and the rx 5000
series from AMD using it the new x revision was developed to keep pace with
the ever increasing demands on our gpus you see the reason that video memory
performance is so important is that you can have the most powerful GPU in the
world but in order to render your frames quickly enough it needs something to
work on so if your vram can't get visual assets and other crucial data to your
GPU quickly enough you can experience slowdowns and even crashes generally
speaking higher resolutions and quality settings require more video memory in
order to store all that extra information which is why you often see
recommendations that users choose a version of a card with more vram if
they're trying to play at 4k but you need high speed to move all that data to
and from your GPU quickly enough which is where gddr6x comes in unlike typical
data pathways called buses which move data one bit at a time gdr6x uses a
technique called pam4 which isn't something you spray your skillet with
but rather a method that can send one of four discrete power levels at a time
instead of two this means that gddr6 can move two bits at a time dramatically
increasing bandwidth and as we demand graphic solutions that can pump out high
resolution frames faster than ever gddr6x has made its way into graphics
cards with the new NVIDIA rtx 3090 and 3080 which are aimed at 8k at 60fps and
4k at 120fps respectively and based on
how much each module of gddr6x can store
the rtx 3090 will have nearly one
terabyte per second of vram bandwidth
while the 3080 will deliver a still staggering 760 gigabytes per second
that's right having more capacity actually gets you more bandwidth and not
only that the pam4 scheme is more power efficient since it can send two bits per
clock cycle meaning super high-res gaming might not require as beefy of a
power supply on desktop or suck as much power if you're using a gaming laptop
but hold on a second james i thought hbm was going to be the way of the future
well high bandwidth memory or hbm did look like it was going to take the
graphics market by storm not too long ago but it was more complex to
manufacture than various versions of GDDR and AMD who developed the
technology moved away from it for their rtx 5000 series however that does not
mean a future variant of hbm couldn't compete
with GDDR as the powers that be are still working on improving the
technology and it might become cheap enough at some point to appear in
mid-range gaming cards instead of mostly in data centers which are using gpus for
non-graphics applications such as ai but for now
gddr6x looks like it'll be king of the hill for a little bit i mean it has an x
in it and that makes it cool right
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