Modders are at it again, this time taking apart NVIDIA's older-gen GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card that launched with 8GB of VRAM and modding it up to 16GB.
The client that requested the mod on their GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card provided the additional memory required, which made the mod on the RTX 2080 less work for the team. NVIDIA originally launched the GeForce RTX 2080 back in 2018 based on the Turing GPU architecture and featuring the TU104-400 GPU. The GPU featured 2944 CUDA cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory interface.
The modders removed the old 8GB of memory from the RTX 2080, soldering on 16GB of GDDR6 memory in its place, while also adjusting the jumpers (as you can see in the pictures below) so that the GPU is tricked into recognizing the new memory installed on the card.
GPU-Z monitoring in the picture above shows the 8GB of GDDR6 memory on the left, while the modded RTX 2080 with its beefed-up 16GB of GDDR6 memory is recognized on the right. The modded RTX 2080 graphics card with its new 16GB framebuffer is recognized without a worry with regular NVIDIA WHQL drivers and no software modifications to get it working.
Adding another 8GB of VRAM to the GeForce RTX 2080 isn't going to double your gaming performance, but in VRAM-limited games you might get a bit of a boost. It's not going to be huge, but the project itself of modding a graphics card and doubling the RAM is always cool in my book, especially if there's no mods and other annoying things you have to do to get it 'working'.