One of the biggest problems with video memory is its high energy consumption when transmitting data, since they have bandwidths as high as a conventional RAM memory, however, each bit transmitted between the VRAM and the GPU consumes it. The same as one of DDR5 memory for example, so the power consumption is much higher.
And it is that in a graphics card not only does the GPU consume energy, but also the VRAM and with the recent announcement that PCI Express graphics cards can have consumption that can go from 450 W to 600 W, the ban opens not only to sell graphics cards faster in processing, but also in memory.
The new 24 Gbps GDDR6
Referenced GDDR6 memory chips with speeds of 20 Gbps and 24 Gbps have appeared in the Samsung catalog. This translates to 25% and 50% higher bandwidth than the current version of the sixth generation graphics DDR, 16 Gbps, and faster than the GDDR6X used by NVIDIA.
Let’s not forget that the GDDR6X is a variation of the GDDR6 that makes use of PAM-4 encoding to reduce the memory clock speed and with it the consumption, so the new modules will have a higher energy consumption than the current ones. Which leads us to think that it is a way to take advantage of the new 12-pin power connector. In other words, everything indicates that we will see them in the high ranges of NVIDIA and AMD.
The big question in all this is NVIDIA, mainly due to the fact that the RTX 3090 Ti is already ready and everything points to, due to the leaked specifications, that it could carry GDDR6X with a capacity of 2 GB per chip, but maybe those of green surprise us during CES. As for AMD, it is another issue, they have never opted for GDDR6X and, therefore, GDDR6 at 20 or 24 Gbps is expected to be used in RX 7000s with RDNA 3 architecture.
What about GDDR6X?
With GDDR6 at higher clock speeds than GDDR6X, the answer to the question is very clear. So the situation is very similar to the GDDR5X in its day, which surely many of you will have forgotten, however, that it is found in the GeForce GTX 1080 as VRAM. As a curiosity, part of its improvements were for the creation of GDDR6.
Most commonly, GDDR6X will eventually be replaced by faster GDDR6. After all, it is a component for exclusive use for top-of-the-range RTX 30s and is not part of the JEDEC standard. It has had its usefulness to be able to grant bandwidths that could not have been achieved at this time with standard VRAM and has been key to the performance of the latest NVIDIA graphics cards.
So the GDDR6X has more than fulfilled its objective, since the use of GDDR6 would have been negative for the performance of the RTX 3080 and more powerful.
