In the PC ecosystem, being able to change the RAM memory of the system is as simple as removing some modules and installing others as long as they are compatible with the platform, but nevertheless in graphics cards the VRAM is not modular and is always soldered. Would it be possible to create graphics cards with interchangeable memory in the same way that we have it in motherboards and CPUs?
The graphics cards that we can buy in the market come with a fixed amount of VRAM, since it is soldered on the PCB of the graphics itself. This fact prevents us from choosing the amount and speed of the dedicated memory for the GPU, unlike for the processor, where as you well know we have a series of sockets on the motherboard in which we can install a wide variety of RAM. in terms of capacities and speeds.
Your GPU VRAM can be modular … but it won’t
It would really be ideal, right? You buy a graphics card that comes only with the GPU, VRM, heatsink and so on but that has some sockets to install VRAM memory in the same way as motherboards have RAM sockets for the processor. This would significantly lower the cost of graphics cards and give us users greater versatility when choosing both the capacity and the speed of the dedicated graphics memory … however, that manufacturers do not allow it has its reasons.
Both motherboards and the graphics cards themselves have a maximum memory limit they can support, so in theory having modular VRAM could be feasible to some extent. We have seen this in some graphics that were available with different amounts of memory, such as the Radeon RX 480 that we could buy both in versions of 4 and 8 GB, since the memory controller of this GPU was configured to support 8 Maximum GB of VRAM. The most common motherboards can support configurations of up to 256 GB in the top-of-the-range models, although 64/128 GB is the most common.
Now, we might think that the reason why we do not have graphics cards with modular VRAM is purely economic, but the thing goes much further. Although technically it would be possible to do so, it would require a much more complex manufacturing process than there is right now since it would not only be a matter of implementing the sockets where to install the memory and the memory modules themselves, but it would also require important modifications to the memory controller and to the GPU itself, since it is designed to work exactly with the amount and speed of VRAM that they have out of the box.
Obviously, a change of this magnitude would have a fairly large economic impact on manufacturers, and for them to do so they would have to see a potential benefit economically speaking, something that could happen thanks to the sale of VRAM modules but obviously over the long term term, so as you can understand it is an area in which they are not exactly investing resources since clearly it is something that will cost them a lot of money initially so as not to see it recovered for a long time, and that if they recover it.
For companies this risk is not worth it; both AMD and NVIDIA want users to buy back most of their technology, and that is the reason for example why Intel integrated its northbridge into the processor. They get their way from an antitrust point of view because they can justify this with higher bandwidths and performance, but manufacturers always prefer and will prefer to sell us a “GPU package” that includes motherboard, memory, GPU, cooling, and so on.
Still, would this technology be viable?
Although the implementation of modular VRAM would cost a lot of money, technically it is something viable and proof of this is that in the field of processors we have been operating like this for many years. Obviously, the memory controller and the GPU itself would have to be substantially modified to support different speeds and VRAM capabilities instead of being optimized to work only with the quantities and speeds they come with from the factory, but for power, it can.
Doing something like that, yes, it could have some impact on performance. That a GPU works and is optimized for a certain amount and speed of RAM means that manufacturers can focus on operating with these specific parameters, optimizing its performance; On the contrary, if they were variable parameters, we could be speaking in other terms with greater versatility for the user, but with a variable performance that could be substantially lower than what they offer by integrating the VRAM directly.