Micron has announced its new GDDR7 memory with 24Gb or 3GB density and bandwidth of 36 Gbps. Faster GDDR7 memory with 3GB modules has been on the cards for a while, opening the door to graphics cards with more VRAM capacity delivering cutting-edge speeds. At one point, these Micron 3GB modules were expected to arrive with the GeForce RTX 50 SUPER Series refresh, which would have seen most cards in the lineup get 50% more VRAM.
The reason why we're bringing up the delayed and potentially canceled RTX 50 SUPER Series is that Micron decided to make the GDDR7 announcement in a blog post titled 'The new performance bottleneck: How more GPU memory unlocks next-gen gaming and AI PCs.' The post, from Micron's Alejandro Breton Garcia, goes to great lengths to talk about how this new 'evolution of GDDR7' will improve PC gaming.
More capacity and bandwidth will make 4K and even 8K gaming more viable, the post claims, while also enabling game engines to render larger, more detailed worlds. The only problem is that with the current memory crisis leading to shortages and price increases that could last the entire year, and Micron's exit from the consumer market by shutting down its Crucial business to focus on data centers, it comes across as tone-deaf.
"By enabling far larger datasets to remain resident in memory, GDDR7 keeps the entire visual pipeline fed; textures, lighting data, geometry sets, and AI inference models, without the bottlenecks that cause visual artifacts or performance instability," the article states. Which would be all well and good if there were any sign that these new GDDR7 modules were going to make their way to the consumer GPU market for PC gaming anytime soon. Assuming the availability of this new GDDR7 memory is imminent, odds are it will all be swallowed up by AI.
