We have previously reported that someone in China is buying RTX 3080 mining cards.A tragic case of evaporating 2GB of display memory after buying one, but the graphics card can still run normally, which is why people know that this trick originally existed. Nowadays, you have to be more and more careful when buying second-hand graphics cards. And if the display memory becomes smaller, will it have a big impact on the performance of this graphics card? I believe many people will be curious. Recently, a foreign YouTuber conducted this test. They cut the 24GB display memory of the RTX 3090 to only 20GB and 12GB, and then compared the performance. The results showed a very big difference.
What will happen if the NVIDIA RTX 3090’s 24GB display memory is reduced to 20GB or 12GB?
A few days ago, Russian YouTube channel PRO Hi-Tech uploaded a video that uses custom BIOS settings to reduce the display memory and memory interface bandwidth of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3060. According to the VIDEOCARDZ description, this BIOS appears to be available from Chinese and Russian forums.
The original specifications of the RTX 3090 were 24GB GDDR6X and 384 bits. They changed this card to 20GB, 320 bits, and 12GB, 192 bits. The memory speeds are the same, but because the interface bandwidth has become smaller, the maximum bandwidth has been reduced from 936GB/s to 780 and 468GB/s.
In the 3DMARK Time Spy benchmark, the 24GB graphics card scored 18,388 points, the 20GB graphics card only dropped a little to 17,686 points, and the 12GB graphics card dropped quite a bit, leaving only 13,996 points, which means a loss of nearly 24%:
In 3DMark Port Royal mode QHD quality settings, 24GB scored 12402 points, 20GB scored 11841 points, and 12GB scored 10342 points:
The scores of the three 4K image quality settings are relatively close. 24GB scored 5941 points, 20GB scored 5651 points, and 12GB scored 4828 points:
In game testing, 24GB can run to 60FPS, 20GB can run a little lower, and 12GB can basically run less than 50FPS:
So overall, when the display memory is reduced to only 12GB and 192-bit memory interface bandwidth, the performance of the RTX 3090 will be left at 76% ~ 85%, and when it is 20GB and 320 bits, it will be 95% ~ 96%. Therefore, the 12GB configuration will have a huge performance loss, and 20GB will be fine. It is no wonder that NVIDIA gave up on the RTX 3080 20GB plan.
As for the GeForce RTX 3060, the original specifications of this card are 12GB GDDR6 and 192-bit memory interface bandwidth. The custom BIOS installed by PRO Hi-Tech limits this card to 4GB and 128-bit. The game performance is reduced by about 18%, and of course the power consumption is also reduced:
So, as the display memory is reduced, performance will indeed be affected, but if it is only a little less, the magnitude of the impact will be okay. anyway,Graphics cards are getting cheaper now, and even give away games, there is absolutely no need to buy such a defective second-hand graphics card.
Full video:
Source: KOCPC Chinese