One trick of graphics card manufacturers to reduce prices is to use cheaper components, one of which is to install smaller capacity memory chips. Which ends up affecting, under certain levels of visual quality, the performance of the games and not for the better. Well if there’s anything we can call planned obsolescence at NVIDIA, It is precisely this limitation.
For the average user, who usually has a screen with a refresh rate of 60Hz, the important thing is that the game can reach this average speed in games, however, there are titles that deceptively do this on many many graphics cards. The reason? Although they achieve this rate of frames per second, some images are not generated in 16.67 milliseconds, but take much longer. Guilty? At NVIDIA, this is due to one of the artificial limitations the company imposes on its models that will cause them to have a shorter lifespan than the competition.
Planned obsolescence of NVIDIA graphics cards
One of the most common problems with a graphics card is when the frame rate drops due to a lack of available memory, as this forces the GPU to pull its DMA unit to access system RAM through the PCI port. Express. Remember that unlike what happens with the CPU, the main memory is far from the dedicated graphics hardware and the VRAM is its local memory and therefore the closest.
Well, when all games change their graphics quality to the highest settings, they end up requiring more video memory. This is where we find planned obsolescence at NVIDIA. In other words, if we compare in terms of GPU or graphics chip, the green brand has better designs than its rival AMD. The problem arises when we talk about memory configurations, especially in high end cards. And all thanks to the use, in many models, of GDDR6 and GDDR6X chips with a capacity of 1 GB per chip, while the RX 6000 and RX 7000 have always opted for 2 GB configurations.
Things get complicated in the new RTX 40, where NVIDIA decided to cut the memory bus, although it didn’t lose bandwidth, the number of chips was cut. Luckily they decided to use 2GB chips like AMD this time, so the problem is in the RTX 30, where 8GB configurations, when faced with certain resolutions and graphics qualities, said problem,
How does this affect gaming performance?
You have to start from the fact that over time the games become more visually complex and require a better graphics card, another thing is the lack of optimization on PC, but that’s another story. We usually look at the average frame rate per second in games, however, there are times when, under certain graphics settings, the amount of minimum FPS that some games achieve is lower than that achieved by lower models of the same generation, but with more video RAM.
Remember that frame time is not the same for all frames and some are fast to run by CPU and GPU while others are slower. When we speak, for example, of 60 FPS, we do not have 60 frames counted in a second, because we are talking about speed. It is the same as going by car, where driving at 100 km/h does not guarantee that you will reach a distance of 100 km from the starting point, because you will encounter things like traffic jams, winding roads, detours, traffic lights, etc. .
The fact is that if a graphics card does not have enough VRAM, the minimum frame rate per second decreases and with this the average FPS is reduced. Due to the fact that due to the lack of video memory, the GPU has to look for it somewhere. This is unheard of when you have a model capable of running certain games with maximum graphic quality due to its technical specifications and whose performance is hampered by the memory installed on the card.
