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10GB vram enough for the 3080? Discuss..

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Shaz12

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PrincessFrosty

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Nvidia will sell whatever people will buy, if there's enough demand for a 20GB variant of the card either they will make an SKU for one or some of the AIB partners will.

Using that as justification to say that 10GB isn't enough is kinda like saying regular HDMI connectors aren't enough because someone makes gold plated ones :D
 

TNA

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PrincessFrosty said:
Nvidia will sell whatever people will buy, if there's enough demand for a 20GB variant of the card either they will make an SKU for one or some of the AIB partners will.

Using that as justification to say that 10GB isn't enough is kinda like saying regular HDMI connectors aren't enough because someone makes gold plated ones :D
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East will use whatever he can find/manufacture, special kind of fella that one :p:D
 

Wrinkly

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EastCoastHandle said:
What a shambles this thread turn into. Apparently, even nvidia agrees that 10gb isn't enough.
:D
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Well we had a lot of 'miss informed' people state 10GB wasn't enough. A few of us argued it was. Some even went as far as trying to educate the 'special cases', you did try PrincessFrosty, but still they come. So I don't see it as any surprise that Nvidia intend to milk the muppets :D

I got my 3080 TUF OC for £720. What I've saved will go towards a new CPU etc. Should last me to Hopper or even RDNA3 (if AMD can work out what RT is) :D
 

iSaff

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PrincessFrosty said:
You can but it's not a straight win, it's always some kind of trade off with the end result usually being some compromise of different factors.

Typically you're trying to balance multiple things like:
1) The amount of memory
2) The memory speed (in mhz)
3) The memory bus width
4) How fast/demanding the GPU is
5) Power/thermal limits

You're not only targeting a certain amount of memory capacity but also a certain amount of total memory bandwidth. If you lack enough memory bandwidth to keep the GPU fed with data then you bottleneck it and performance drops. Memory bandwidth is the total bus width multiplied by the memory speed, however each actual memory chip typically has a smaller width on its own interface, in most cases it's 32bit.

The 3080 for example has 10GB of vRAM which is 10x1Gb chips each with a 32bit interface, giving you a total of 10x32bit for a bus width of 320bits. And then a memory speed of 19Gbps which in bytes is /8 so 2.375GBps, multiplied by the 320bit bus width for your 760GB/sec total memory bandwidth.

The 6800XT opted for 16GB total memory and used 2GB chips of GDDR6 but those chips while larger are still the same bus width, so 8 total chips of 2GB each to get the total 16GB but that only leaves you with a bus width of 8*32bit or 256bit. That mixed with the fact the chips are slower at only 16Gbps or 2GBps means they only have 512GB/sec total memory bandwidth.

Normally this little memory bandwidth would bottleneck such a powerful GPU, so they spend a lot of silicon area on chip making Infinity Cache, essentially a very large L3 cache to reduce demand on vRAM. But that has a trade off because more area of the silicon spent on memory means less on transistors to do calculations with, meaning less performance. And then on top of all of that there's cost. Faster memory cost more, GDDR6x is more expensive than GDDR6, higher capacity memory costs more and the downside is that it has the same memory interface which means if you use double the density memory you get half the effective bandwidth.

It's all one giant trade off, you can target one thing to get perfect but often to the detriment of other things.
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Thanks for the the very thoughtful and informative post. While I do still feel something like a 12GB design would have calmed many concerns, I'm admittedly ignorant of the engineering and logistics involved, and as I stated previously, while I do think 10GB is right on the edge, it may also turn out to be enough, we just don't know, and personally, I'm happy to turn settings down a notch, if I run into a wall after a couple of years.
 

g67575

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138 pages discussing something that has already been decided :D

No one has bothered to find out what the performance penalty is if the 10GB VRAM is fully utilized. Could be as little as 1 FPS, you won't know until you test it.

The simple answer is- If you can still get a minimum of 60 FPS or more at the desired resolution, exceeding the VRAM limit is irrelevant.

If gaming at 8K, I think this would definitely be worth investigating, but we're a long way off from that.
 
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