Next-Gen Memory: GDDR6

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards are the first ever to make use of GDDR6 memory technology, of which NVIDIA has 11GB on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti that kicks off at 14Gbps of memory bandwidth.

This type of memory bandwidth is incredibly important as the resolution of your games scale, with 4K really needing the increased GPU horsepower and especially the much faster memory. 11GB of next-gen GDDR6 at 14Gbps is absolutely insane, making the 10Gbps of the GTX 1080 and 11Gbps of the GTX 1080 Ti look slow in comparison.

The 11GB of GDDR6 sits on a large 352-bit memory bus (the same width as the GTX 1080 Ti) with 11 x 32-bit memory controllers providing 616GB/sec of memory bandwidth, a large 27% increase over the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and its 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth with GDDR5X. NVIDIA is no stranger to the bleeding edge of memory technologies, as they were first to market with GPUs that packed GDDR5X and HBM2 memory. Turing is the first GPU to market to use GDDR6, and it truly is a big leap.

NVIDIA explains GDDR6 as the "next big advance in high-bandwidth GDDR DRAM memory design", something that is enhanced "with many high-speed SerDes and RF techniques, GDDR6 memory interface circuits in Turing GPUs have been completely redesigned for speed, power efficiency, and noise reduction. This new interface design comes with many new circuit and signal training improvements that minimize noise and variations due to process, temperature, and supply voltage. Extensive clock gating was used to minimize power consumption during periods of lower utilization, resulting in significant overall power efficiency improvement. Turing's GDDR6 memory subsystem delivers 14 Gbps signaling rates and 20% power efficiency improvement over GDDR5X memory used in Pascal GPUs".

Turing's package and board designs were "carefully crafted" to handle the higher speed requirements, something that is helped along with a huge 40% reduction in signal crosstalk, which NVIDIA says is "one of the most severe impairments in large memory systems". NVIDIA says that "every aspect of the memory subsystem was carefully crafted to meet the demanding standards that are required for such high frequency operation. Every signal in the design was carefully optimized to provide the cleanest memory interface signaling as possible".