WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.760 Have you ever taken your shiny new graphics card home only to be disappointed at how you 00:00:03.760 --> 00:00:07.200 can't turn the settings up as far as you want in some hyped up AAA game? 00:00:07.200 --> 00:00:11.920 It turns out that in many cases, this isn't because the GPU is underpowered, instead you 00:00:11.920 --> 00:00:15.800 might not have enough video memory, or the amount you do have might just be too slow. 00:00:15.800 --> 00:00:20.880 But the next generation of VRAM, GDDR7, promises to help alleviate some of these issues with 00:00:20.880 --> 00:00:27.800 never before seen bandwidth. This is a big deal because of the rapidly increasing demands being put on gaming PCs, 00:00:27.800 --> 00:00:32.200 where the high resolution textures and complex visual effects of big name titles can overload 00:00:32.200 --> 00:00:36.320 all but the highest end hardware, meaning you need enough high speed VRAM to hold all 00:00:36.320 --> 00:00:43.040 that data that the GPU is being asked to process. In fact, one of the more common gripes from folks who bought the RTX 3070 on an upper 00:00:43.040 --> 00:00:48.000 tier GPU was that it only came with 8GB of VRAM, resulting in performance issues and 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:51.600 graphical glitches in games that the GPU itself could probably have handled. 00:00:51.600 --> 00:00:56.240 Enter GDDR7, which is expected to bring us a huge bump in memory bandwidth without sucking 00:00:56.240 --> 00:01:00.080 down more power, which is great news for those who just want to turn up the settings but 00:01:00.080 --> 00:01:03.960 are already fighting the rising power draws of Neurogen graphics cards. 00:01:03.960 --> 00:01:08.600 We're talking 36GB per second per PIN. 00:01:08.600 --> 00:01:14.520 Once you translate this into a card with a 2.6-bit wide memory bus, that is a full 1.15 00:01:14.520 --> 00:01:21.640 terabytes per second of throughput. To put that into perspective, the RTX 4080 only has around 700GB per second of memory 00:01:21.640 --> 00:01:25.600 bandwidth, so all that extra space in the pipe could help demanding titles even without 00:01:25.600 --> 00:01:31.960 adding more actual VRAM. But what exactly is the secret sauce that allows GDDR7 to reach these new heights? 00:01:31.960 --> 00:01:36.800 GDDR7 uses a little trick called PAM3, and that's not the stuff you spray on your 00:01:36.800 --> 00:01:41.000 pan so the tater tots don't stick. It's Pulse Amplitude Modulation. 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:46.800 In PAM3, each clock cycle can have 3 voltage states, positive 1, negative 1, or 0. 00:01:46.800 --> 00:01:50.400 Each sequence of 2 cycles encodes 3 bits of data. 00:01:50.400 --> 00:01:55.440 For example, a negative 1, followed by a positive 1, corresponds to the bits 0, 1, 0. 00:01:55.440 --> 00:02:00.800 In this way, each clock cycle encodes 1.5 bits of data instead of just a single bit. 00:02:00.800 --> 00:02:04.520 But you're a savvy viewer, and maybe you already know that the current top-end video 00:02:04.520 --> 00:02:07.640 memory, GDDR6X, actually supports PAM4. 00:02:07.640 --> 00:02:11.960 I mean, isn't that better? 4 is a bigger number than 3. 00:02:11.960 --> 00:02:16.520 I think. Maybe. Well, it's only better to a point. 00:02:16.520 --> 00:02:21.600 PAM4's encoding scheme actually delivers 2 bits per cycle, making it faster than PAM3 00:02:21.600 --> 00:02:28.520 on paper. But there are some drawbacks. More possible states per cycle means that there's a greater chance for errors in data 00:02:28.520 --> 00:02:32.880 transmission. And to compensate for this, you need more error correction functionality as well as 00:02:32.880 --> 00:02:36.240 a new physical design and different memory controllers. 00:02:36.240 --> 00:02:40.440 All of these things increase both the cost and the power consumption, not to mention 00:02:40.440 --> 00:02:46.000 that the GDDR6X can only operate in PAM4 mode when data is being sent in 8-byte bursts 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:51.240 instead of the more standard 16-bytes, meaning GDDR6X can actually have less bandwidth overall 00:02:51.240 --> 00:02:56.960 in real-world scenarios. Put all this together, and GDDR7 is supposed to give us more bandwidth while being more 00:02:56.960 --> 00:03:01.960 energy efficient than GDDR6X, not to mention it can switch off PAM3 when it's not needed 00:03:01.960 --> 00:03:05.120 and instead use the 1-bit per cycle NRZ scheme. 00:03:05.120 --> 00:03:11.920 But when are we actually going to see our graphics cards? The answer is probably late 2024, as that's when we're due for another major GPU refresh 00:03:11.920 --> 00:03:17.720 from both AMD and NVIDIA. And reports are already out that NVIDIA may be planning to use GDDR7 for its upcoming 00:03:17.720 --> 00:03:23.720 RTX 5000 GPU series, which I will definitely be buying as long as I can sell a couple of 00:03:23.720 --> 00:03:27.880 my organs first. Thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out some of our other videos, and comment 00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:30.280 with video suggestions down below, and don't forget to subscribe and follow.