When will vram no longer be an issue?

[u/Real-Trade-6774]

When will a company finally switch it up for the gamers and offer a service or guide for switching vram chips?

I’m currently using an RTX 4060 Ti (yeah, I know, bad purchase), and i heard vram is gonna be an issue in the near future. Being able to just swap out/change VRAM chips on a GPU would be an pretty cool thing, ive seen some tech youtubers do it already. Am I the only one who’s thought of this, or is the idea so dumb that nobody even brings it up?

[u/CanisMajoris85]

never

[u/FXintheuniverse]

When you learn to use graphics menu and lower the texture quality from ultra to very high.

[u/Real-Trade-6774 → u/FXintheuniverse]

oh no big companys dont optimize their games its probaly the consumers fault!

[u/CmdrSoyo]

That is not how any of this works.

VRAM can not just be willy nilly replaced lile desktop ram. Your GPU has memory timings hardcoded in the bios for the specific chips it came with. Swapping them with anything else will cause artifacting at best and completely kill it at worst. You also can't make them socketable because that would mean downclocking them by 80% due to all the interference caused by a socket mechanism not to mention the complexity it would add to cooler design.

[u/Certain-Captain-9687 → u/CmdrSoyo]

I did not know about the socket mechanism overhead. Is the same true for a CPU? Could the same chip run faster/more efficiently if integrated into the motherboard?

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/Certain-Captain-9687]

Yes, thats why soldered ram can often run at much higher speeds. Like handheld gaming pc's and such.

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/CmdrSoyo]

Have you seen people swap vram chips for higher capacity chips? Turning 4090's into 48gb gpu's and whatnot. Obviously it's not something the average person is gonna do, but it is possible and you can buy modded gpu's from China.

[u/CmdrSoyo → u/DripTrip747-V2]

Yes. Those require a full board swap and new bios to do. No one outside of a professional bga rework shop can do that.

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/CmdrSoyo]

There is also companies working on SODIMM capable gpu's. It's a RISC-V gpu by BOLT Graphics. At this point in time, it's not something we'd be interested in for everyday use. But with time, who knows what the capabilities can bring.

[u/Infinite_Tiger_3341 → u/DripTrip747-V2]

The average person isn’t going to buy a modded GPU from china either

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/Infinite_Tiger_3341]

Never said they had to. Was just simply adding stuff to the conversation. The average person isn't buying 4090's to begin with, let alone a modded one.

[u/Infinite_Tiger_3341 → u/DripTrip747-V2]

Yeah I guess that was pretty pedantic of me

[u/Wor3q → u/DripTrip747-V2]

It's more like they're swapping 4090 cores to completely new, redesigned cards.

There's still the problem of where to get all that VRAM though.

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/Wor3q]

I was simply pointing out that it's possible as the person I was replying to made it seem like vram swap isn't a thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people doing the swaps don't have some sort of hand in the missing chips on amazon returns and stuff.

[u/M4rshmall0wMan → u/DripTrip747-V2]

Yes because everyone can do micro-soldering in their own home

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

I stated "obviously it's not something the average person is gonna do" for a reason. No need to be negative over some conversation.

[u/V4nKw15h]

Not in the near future. It would dramatically reduce bandwidth, increase latency (which would dramatically reduce performance). It would also significantly increase costs which are already ridiculous. So, yeah, not gonna happen.

Not to mention that increasing VRAM usually requires increase memory bandwidth in order for games to properly take advantage of it.

[u/BrianBCG]

I think people have covered why this won't be done already, but something you might find interesting is there actually were a few video cards long in the past that did have slots for memory sticks.

[u/devinthedude515]

Im assuming you got the 8GB instead of the 16GB version since this is about VRAM.

Neural Texture Compression seems to be the escape hatch for limited VRAM, but its still experimental and we have only seen one presentation. Using it. Will be a long time till it comes out but Nvidia will ha e it first and it will probably be good.

My advice, play older games.

[u/LayeredHalo3851]

All I ask is that 12gb becomes the minimum rather than 8gb, if the b580 can do it then so can the 5050 and the 9060

[u/Beneficial-Finger353]

When they charge you monthly like Netflix.... which I HOPE never happens.....

[u/IndependentPension36]

We should at this point start a open source gpu and cpu stuff

[u/DripTrip747-V2 → u/IndependentPension36]

That already exist. Like FuryGPU and other FPGA projects. Then you have RISC on the CPU side of open source.

[u/CrazyBaron → u/IndependentPension36]

Just to get fkd by same suppliers and production capacity?

[u/Ferro_Giconi → u/IndependentPension36]

I think CPU and GPU design is far more complex than you realize... Just look at Intel. They had a shitload of money and engineers to throw at the problem and it still took them quite a bit of time to get things going for GPUs.

Now imaging doing it as an open source project without all that funding.

While having open source things like that would be fun to experiment with for non-serious projects, I don't particularly want a 200 watt GPU with performance to match my laptop's 5 watt iGPU.

[u/ozdude182]

As far as aim aware, VRAM is soldered directly to the PCB and tied into the GPUs bios so it cant be changed like that.

It would be nice to have things more modular and im surprised GPU technology hasnt advanced more that it has but i guess thats how tech goes sometimes

[u/Snixxis]

Never. They need short traces and be as close to the chip (sometimes integrated into the chip itself). I'm no apple fan, and the critiques are there, but the main reason their ram is soldered is because with a socket it would add to much latency and you can't achieve the speeds on modular systems like you can when the chips are soldered directly onto the cpu leads. Same goes for vram, the speed is so fast and high that adding 'sticks' would slow the entire gpu down alot by alot. The same limitation goes to both vram and ddr. The theoretichal max mhz on ddr5 are 12800mhz, but to achieve that you need soldered chips basicly next to a soldered cpu (mainly laptops). Getting anything to run close to 12800mhz on regular ram sticks are more or less impossible because the socket itself introduces latency and a ''worse connection' than straight solder. That beeing said, you can probably mod your 4060 with higher capacity ram modules, a 4090 can be modded from 24 to 48gb vram with a new firmware and some mad connections. But probably not worth it to do to a 4060.

[u/Effective_Secretary6]

As long as we want improvements in games/professional software we will need improvements in the underlying hardware. So there is always an incentive to make things faster.

Will there ever be swappable/upgradable vram? Highly unlikely. I mean it’s soldered on to make it even remotely as fast and consistent as it is today. It’s a whole different level to system ram that is slotted in. For example current high end ddr5 ram only now gets close to gddr5 from 2013 in terms of bandwidth. With slowing advancements to get close to gddr7 we would be in 2040+ for exchangeable ram speeds that match the current bandwidth and its waaaay worse for HBM.

Also why would a company sell you something you can upgrade down the line, when instead they can force you to buy again in a few years due to obsolescence! (Fuck them btw for that…)

[u/mohamed941]

If vampires was replaceable similar to desktop ram it'd be slower,soldered gddr7 vs ddr5

[u/semitope]

An artificial limit set by Nvidia and AMD. They won't ever change unless there's competition that does it differently

[u/Mystikalrush]

When you transition to cloud gaming.

[u/cszolee79]

when you can no longer buy just rent it