Some of you may remember almost a decade ago, NVIDIA was cast into the drama spotlight with the GeForce GTX 970 and the missing 0.5GB of graphics memory from its advertised 4GB graphics memory. After a class-action lawsuit was settled back in 2016, you’d think the card would be cast into the annals of history but no, someone actually thought it would be a good idea to revive it and, more importantly, beef it up by giving it double the GPU memory.
Brazilian modders Paulo Gomes, Jefferson Silva, and Felipe Triana made the decision to breathe new life into the GTX 970 by soldering 8GB of GDDR5 memory onto the card. To answer some of the burning questions in the back of your mind: yes, the card is old. Yes, they apparently can buy GDDR5 chips (easily even). And yes, the Maxwell-era card is still supported, even by today’s latest drivers.
The modders basically removed the 512MB modules on the GTX 970 that ran at 7Gbps and replaced them with 1GB modules that run at 8Gbps. Prior to the modding, they tested the card on Unigine Superposition at 8K, which resulted in the card scoring 800 points. Upon switching out the modules, that score jumped to nearly double the points at 1,576.
It’s clear that the modders were curious and perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic. There is obviously no benefit in trying to use the modded GTX 970 as a daily driver as such, we should assume that they were trying to get the card running on what is currently the defacto amount of 8GB of graphics memory, especially if you’re still gaming in the realm of Full HD.
Anything higher than that, and you’re obviously looking at cards with 10GB or 12GB, such as the RTX 3080 or RTX 4070 Ti.
(Source: Paulo Gomes via YouTube)
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