The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was one of the best graphics cards money can buy. Sadly, the five-year-old graphics card's glory days are long behind it. Nonetheless, one avid user wanted to revitalize the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, quadrupling the memory on the Turing flagship through a clever mod.
Admittedly, Nvidia has neglected the Titan series over the last few generations. The chipmaker's last Titan SKU hails from the Turing days, actually, in the shape of the Titan RTX. Why is this important, you may ask? Well, the Titan RTX utilizes the same reference PCB as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which is the key reason why someone was able to boost the memory from 11GB up to 44GB.
The reference PCB has room for 24 GDDR6 memory modules, 12 on each side. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti only occupies 11 of the 12 frontside slots with 1GB GDDR6 chips. Even the Titan RTX doesn't use all 24 of the memory slots. The graphics card only populates the 12 frontside slots with 2GB GDDR6 chips.
With the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the modder (via wxnod) performed a textbook replacement mod. The person substituted the existing 1GB memory modules with 2GB Samsung variants and populated the remaining slot in the front and all 12 slots on the rear of the PCB. There is 48GB onboard, but due to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti's design and narrower memory interface, it can only access 22 of the memory slots. The result is a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 44GB of GDDR6 memory. GDDR6 pricing has improved substantially, which helps finance user projects like this one. A few years ago, a single Samsung 2GB GDDR6 memory module sold for over $200 on Chinese platforms like AliExpress.
According to the GPU-Z and DirectX screenshots, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti effectively detects all 44GB. The sample is from Leadtek and employs an Nvidia reference PCB. Logically, the memory swap didn't affect the graphics card's memory bandwidth. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has a 352-bit memory interface and pumps out 616 GB/s with 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory modules regardless of the capacity of the chips.
Unfortunately, the awesome mod is just for show. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 44GB of GDDR6 memory boots fine into the operating system, but it doesn't work in benchmarks or games. It's a known problem. We have seen similar user-modded graphics cards in the past, such as a GeForce RTX 2070 with 16GB or, more recently, a GeForce RTX 3070 with 16GB. The projects are usually a hit or miss since the modified graphics cards lack proper vBIOS and driver support.
