German tech media PC Games Hardware recently tested a modified RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, whose VRAM capacity was doubled from the original 11GB to 22GB, showing astonishing performance gains at 4K settings.
Benchmark data shows that this eight-year-old Turing architecture flagship achieved up to a 73% performance boost in the latest AAA titles after replacing its memory chips with higher-capacity ones.
Reportedly, this graphics card was purchased from Alibaba, where an enthusiast replaced all the original 1GB GDDR6 memory chips with 2GB chips manufactured by Samsung.
Through this physical modification, the graphics card's memory bus width remains unchanged, but the total capacity reaches 22GB, sufficient to handle the demands of various VRAM-intensive games expected in 2026.
During actual testing, the modified RTX 2080 Ti showed vastly different performance at different resolutions: at 2K (1440p) resolution with DLSS Quality mode, most games saw little performance improvement, with only Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 recording a 29% increase.
However, once switching to 4K resolution and enabling frame generation technology, the advantage of the 22GB VRAM instantly shines: in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the average frame rate surged from 30.2 FPS to 52.5 FPS, a 73.8% increase, while Spider-Man 2 also recorded a 64% performance boost.
It's worth noting that the benefits of increased VRAM aren't limited to gaming. In AI workload tests, the 22GB version executed significantly faster than the original 11GB model, demonstrating the general value of large VRAM in scenarios like large language model inference.
Overall, the benefits of upgrading from 11GB to 22GB heavily depend on resolution and game type, with modern AAA titles at 4K being the true stage for it to showcase its power.