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.
The bottom line is that VRAM has a lot more bandwidth than your main system RAM. For example,
a 1GB GDDR6X chip has a transfer rate of around 84GB per second compared to DDR4 3200, which is
only about 26GB per second. All this 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 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 regular RAM. It'd be so much easier.
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in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.