How Micron’s GDDR6X memory is the secret to unlocking 4K on Nvidia’s RTX 30-series cards
Even with consoles iterating on an extended-established cadence, PC hardware has found ways to protect forward. Right here is regularly due to the innovations that replace how pc graphics work, and that’s taking place factual now with Nvidia’s next wave of GeForce RTX GPUs. The RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 exhaust Micron’s new GDDR6X memory. Right here’s a step above the long-established GDDR6 VRAM, and it’ll also signify a generational leap forward in machine-bandwidth efficiency resulting from Micron’s PAM4 tech.
Pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) is the title for pushing 2 bits of information over a connection in its set of 1 bit. It’s a technical theory, however indubitably, this allows the machine to call from 4 doable states in its set of two with every burst of information. With PAM4, Micron and Nvidia are promising a significant enhance to I/O information rates and bandwidth. GDDR6X is additionally more energy efficient. At 21Gb/s, GDDR6X uses 15% much less energy per bit than GDDR6 at 14Gb/s.
Micron claims that GDDR6X’s per-pin information charge of 21Gb/s, must you mix all these pins and memory modules on something love the RTX 3090, the GPU has a total memory bandwidth of 936GB/s. That’s big. For comparison, the memory bandwidth of the Xbox Sequence X tops out at 560GB/s and the PS5 is 448GB/s.
Achieve merely, this means that the GPU can pull a gigantic quantity of information from its memory in an rapid. And that’s going to result in better games.
“[Gamers] purchase pleasure in elevated machine-information rates,” Micron graphics boss Ralf Ebert acknowledged in a media presentation. “That might enhance the information that is transferred between the GPU and the memory interface. We predict about we’ll be enabling 8K resolutions and getting nearer to true-time ray tracing.”
What it indubitably capability is GPUs will eventually have adequate bandwidth to conveniently take care of 4K. In a world the set even the $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti struggles to hit 60 frames per 2d at 4K, GDDR6X is a important to putting us past that barrier.