Launched way back in 2014, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970 was one of NVIDIA’s most popular graphics cards. At the same time, it was one of the most controversial GPUs. It was announced as a 4GB VRAM GPU, and it quickly became a target of criticism when everyone found that it had, in fact, just 3.5 GB of memory at full speed. The remaining 500 MB operated at 1/7 of the bandwidth. The backlash was so huge that NVIDIA had to pay about $30 per unit in a legal agreement to refund buyers.
GTX 970 Gets 8 GB of VRAM via Modding
Now, more than a decade after the controversial release, the Brazilian Paulo Gomes and his team decided to face this historic failure and upgrade the GTX 970. The team formed by Paulo Gomes, Jefferson Silva, and Felipe Triana took an ASUS GTX 970 and made a physical upgrade in the GPU’s memories. They’ve replaced the 512 MB modules with 1GB memory offering a higher clock ( 8 Gbps over 7 Gbps). Due to the change, the GTX 970 now counts with 8GB instead of the original 4GB VRAM.
Besides this change, Paulo Gommes and his team already made other curious mods like upgrading an RTX 3070 to 12 GB of VRAM. Although GTX 970’s Maxwell architecture still limits the access to bandwidth, the modded GPU can at least offer 7GB at full bandwidth. It’s a considerable improvement over the original 3.5GB. But be aware of the fact that the update does not make this a GPU that will compete with modern releases.
The test the performance, the group used the Unigine Superposition 8K benchmark. The original GTX 970 scored about 800 points, whereas the modded unit scored an impressive 1,500 points. It shows a real performance gain that is almost twice the original thanks to the faster memories.
The extra memories can certainly help the new GPU to perform better in games that are compatible with it. However, it is worth noting that despite the upgrade its performance won’t be comparable to other graphics cards with 8 GB like its successors in the RTX class. It’s a mod to show that this is something feasible, but the complexity of it probably won’t justify users trying to do the same. Also, the lack of support, makes the use of GTX 960 quite challenging.
