Pushing Limits: Upgrading a Classic GTX 970 to 8GB VRAM
One might wonder how far a piece of classic hardware can go with serious upgrades. This is what a techie and tech blogger from Brazil wanted to find out - taking an 11-year-old NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 graphics card and granting it a new life, finding out how much it can be pushed upward in vid memory from the pool of 4GB up to a whopping 8GB. Obviously, the findings were staggering.
Revitalizing a Commodore GPU
GeForce GTX 970 first came on the market back in 2014 and was a hot seller back in the days for offering 4GB of VRAM. Our self-proclaimed modder, Paulo Gomes, did not just upgrade a few components. Instead, he replaced all those old 512MB memory chips with a brand new beefier 1GB chip. It wasn't something you could easily plug in and play, though. Some pretty careful tweaks and adjustment were required on the boards of the card to make sure that the large amount of new memory fitted.
Proof in the Pixels: Performance Improvements
All the work paid off. Absolutely. To see just how much of a difference the extra memory made, the blogger put both the standard and the upgraded GTX 970 through their paces using the Superposition Benchmark.
The vanilla 4GB card registered 866 points. The 8GB modded version. It rocketed to a stunning 1576 points. That's quite the upgrade. But it did not stop there. This "homemade" powerhouse even outscored a newer card, the GeForce GTX 1060 (with 6GB of VRAM) by a single point in that same benchmark. That's because it shows how much video memory can impact performance, and that's maybe what NVIDIA has been discussing the most lately.
Such an intelligent experiment remarkably demonstrates how VRAM is becoming more and more important as applications and games keep becoming more and more demanding. Incredible what a little creativity and technical know-how can do, even with something that's from the past.
