Nvidia back at their memory game - RTX 3080 20GB found and benchmarked

[williamcll]

A man from Bilibili managed to buy himself a 3080 with 20GB of memory from an anonymous person with bitcoins, he benchmarked it:

3080 20GB is in the middle, note doubled VRAM size

Shadow of the tomb raider on 4K

The specs of his PC was:
Ryzen 9 5950X
MSI MEG B500 UNIFY

XPG Spectrix D50 overclocked to 4266 CL18 FCLK 2066Mhz

Western Digital Black SN750 4TB

Phanteks Glacier one 360MP

Win 10 Pro 1909

Driver version 460.79

Note that the card he bought was purposely damaged and then repaired so these benchmarks should not be taken as final. He also commented that the final product may come with different specs as well.

 

Source: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av501358563

Thoughts: Very bizarre way he got his card but it's not as far fetched as when Linus got his iMac Motherboard. I doubt this card will be readily available at all. Reading the comments there's also a chance he might have been given a Frankenstein card (like the famous "2080 ti Super" that was made by soldering more memory onto one card).

[PlayStation 2]

let's just solve all of this this by introducing a 7+1GB GTX 970 :^)

[WhitetailAni]

Just bring back the GeForce 4, except PCIe instead of AGP.

[germgoatz]

why cant we just get a 12gb 3080 because 10gb is not enough but 20gb is way too much and a waste of money for most gamers

[Velcade]

Just give me a GPU with some SO-DIMM slots, I'll add my own memory. 

[porina]

15 minutes ago, germgoatz said:

why cant we just get a 12gb 3080 because 10gb is not enough but 20gb is way too much and a waste of money for most gamers

It's a pretty narrow gap to say 10GB isn't enough but 12GB is.

[illegalwater]

I'm assuming this is intended for miners and workstations? A 20GB 3080 is going to be hopelessly out of date long before 20GB is beneficial for games.

[tikker]

So we're back at the non-Ti 3080 now huh?

[germgoatz]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

It's a pretty narrow gap to say 10GB isn't enough but 12GB is.

ive seen benchmarking videos where games max out the ram on 3440x1440

[Moonzy]

whoo if there's G6X modules on the back of the PCB, i hope they're well cooled

[Kisai]

11 minutes ago, germgoatz said:

why cant we just get a 12gb 3080 because 10gb is not enough but 20gb is way too much and a waste of money for most gamers

Machine learning requires more memory. 4K and 8K games, not so much.

 

The reason certain numbers show up has to do with channels (eg "bits") of memory that can be accessed. The 3080 is listed as 320-bit with 10GB GDDR6X, The 3090 is 384-bit with 24GB GDDR6X, the 3070 is 256-bit with 8GB. 3060 Ti is 256 bit with 8GB GDDR6, and 3060 is 12GB GDDR6 with 192 bit.

 

The less wide the bits are, the narrower that bus is, so that effectively means to access larger amounts of memory, more latency will be induced the more of that memory is utilized. It's like how your PC might operate in single channel or dual channel mode. It doesn't result in the memory speed being cut in half, but it does noticeably impact the performance when the memory is fully utilized.

 

So there is some logic to maybe lower-end cards having more memory if they are intended for non-gaming purposes, but realisticly, since the 3060 apparently has the same performance as the 1080, and the 1080 with 8GB can just barely push 4Kp60, it makes sense to have more memory, though I somehow doubt that the 3080/3090 can do 8kp60+ just on the basis of the numbers not making sense, as moving from 1080p to 2160p quadruples the amount of pixels on screen, and 2160 (4k) to 4320 (8k) again quadruples it. Yet we're expected to use the same 8GB to drive something with 16x the pixel density. Sure the video buffer isn't the entire video memory, but it's an increasing amount of it, and without increases to the texture size, you don't really have an 4k or 8k experience either.

 

20GB might not even be enough for a true 8K experience. But YMMV.

 

[RejZoR]

4 hours ago, ragnarok0273 said:

Just bring back the GeForce 4, except PCIe instead of AGP.

I remember GeForce 4. There was regular 64MB version and "better" 128MB version. Except the one with more memory used slower memory and it was often worse because of it.

[Lii]

well at least they finally removed the quadros

it was quite a mess when they were also placed at the same price of geforces

[Velcade]

18 minutes ago, comander said:

So the current memory config is done to extract maximum bandwidth...

 

Adding in sodimm slots wouldn't get you much benefit vs going to system RAM. 

It was a joke.  Just laugh and move on.

[spartaman64]

5 hours ago, Moonzy said:

whoo if there's G6X modules on the back of the PCB, i hope they're well cooled

also does this consume 120w more power?

[linuxChips2600]

50 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

also does this consume 120w more power?

 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

9 hours ago, illegalwater said:

I'm assuming this is intended for miners and workstations? A 20GB 3080 is going to be hopelessly out of date long before 20GB is beneficial for games.

No, it's Nvidia's RTX 3090 competitor.

[Letgomyleghoe]

9 hours ago, germgoatz said:

why cant we just get a 12gb 3080 because 10gb is not enough but 20gb is way too much and a waste of money for most gamers

I mean, 12gb isn't gonna make that much of a difference to make any price increase reasonable, so 16-20gb is optimal IMO.

[illegalwater]

25 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

No, it's Nvidia's RTX 3090 competitor.

To be fair the 3090 is also a joke for gaming. Almost twice the price of a 3080 for what, 10-15% more performance and an extremely overkill amount of VRAM?

 

IMO this 20GB 3080 and the 3090 are just gimped Titans.

[SFFDesigns]

10 hours ago, Velcade said:

Just give me a GPU with some SO-DIMM slots, I'll add my own memory. 

This exactly! I really hope upgradeable VRAM via a slot or something comes someday, it would be so useful for lengthening the lifespan of a card

[XWAUForceflow]

On 1/29/2021 at 5:06 PM, germgoatz said:

why cant we just get a 12gb 3080 because 10gb is not enough but 20gb is way too much and a waste of money for most gamers

Simple, 20GB means that they don't have to change anything on the card except to double the capacity of each VRAM chip. As far as I understand the issue you can simply swap the chips with ones that have double capacity and the cards will pretty much work as is. There might be a small driver tweak needed, but the physical layout can stay exactly the same. As such this would be a very easy and cost efficient way to upgrade the cards. Much easier than doing anything other than double, because then you actually have to change the layout and number of chips which would also change the bandwidth that is available for the VRAM.

[HenrySalayne]

2 hours ago, XWAUForceflow said:

As such this would be a very easy and cost efficient way to upgrade the cards.

3080 and 3090 PCBs are almost identical. Nvidia will just put another 10 memory modules on the back and call it a 3080 Ti. There are even two empty spots for memory modules on a 3080 PCB and it would be easily possible to make a 3085 with 12 GB of VRAM. But the step to 12 GB is simply to small - they will just use a 3090 PCB and call it a day.

[Mister Woof]

I think it has to do with the memory bus.

 

3080s will only ever be 10 or 20gb

3060 ti/3070s only 8 or 16

3060 6 or 12

 

[StDragon]

On 1/29/2021 at 4:22 PM, Velcade said:

It was a joke.  Just laugh and move on.

 

On 1/29/2021 at 8:15 PM, Hymenopus_Coronatus said:

This exactly! I really hope upgradeable VRAM via a slot or something comes someday, it would be so useful for lengthening the lifespan of a card

 

Joking aside, it does seem like a reasonable idea. But as @comander stated, it's an issue of bandwidth. But equally just as important is thermal management. I can't imagine a proper heatsink solution for a consumer VRAM upgrade option. Those ICs get smoking hot as it is!

[Maticks]

You can't have upgradable VRAM Slots, you would need to tear down the card to install them for starters. they'd have to design a VRAM Cooler to wrap around the Dimms.

user error installing them or dust in the socket would cause crashes, let along thermal issues.

We also have to look at the costs, that complexity and space usage of socketable memory is going to drive up the costs its also going to make the card bigger.

 

finding memory 4 years or more later for the thing would be hard, and also the GPU is still old gen so more memory won't make it faster.

 

Still not a big fan of the 3090 not because its twice the price but because the memory is on the back and not being cooled like the other side of the card.

Memory modules overheating and throttling is not going to help performance, who know what happens with those back memory modules in 3 years time they probably will start dying.

 

10G of memory on the 3080 is plenty enough for now.. and when the 4080 comes out upgrade then. just turn down shadows or something which you don't really notice from extreme to ultra.

If i launch every application on my computer i can fill up my memory, do i run it like that on a normal day. no... so why would you turn everything to ultra and go my memory is full. you have like 40FPS, you happy with that. nooo so do turn some stuff down and the GPU can cop memory will free up as well.