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Even with consoles iterating at a regular cadence, PC hardware has found ways to stay ahead. This is generally due to innovations that change the way computer graphics works, and that is happening right now with the next wave of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GPUs. The RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090 use Micron’s new GDDR6X memory. This is a step above traditional GDDR6 VRAM and could represent a generational leap in system bandwidth performance thanks to Micron’s PAM4 technology.
Pulse Width Modulation (PAM4) is the name for sending 2 bits of data over a connection instead of 1 bit. It’s a technical concept, but essentially, this allows the system to call from 4 potential states instead of 2 with each burst of information. With PAM4, Micron and Nvidia promise a significant increase in I / O data rates and bandwidth. GDDR6X is also more energy efficient. At 21 Gb / s, GDDR6X uses 15% less power per bit than GDDR6 at 14 Gb / s.
Micron claims that GDDR6X 21 Gb / s data per pin rate, when you combine all those pins and memory modules into something like the RTX 3090, the GPU has a total memory bandwidth of 936 GB / s. That is huge. For comparison, the memory bandwidth of the Xbox Series X tops out at 560GB / s and the PS5 is 448GB / s.
Simply put, this means that the GPU can extract a large amount of data from its memory in an instant. And that will lead to better games.
“[Gamers] Take advantage of higher system data rates, ”said Micron chief graphics officer Ralf Ebert in a media presentation. “That increases the data that is transferred between the GPU and the memory interface. We believe that we will enable 8K resolutions and move closer to real-time ray tracing. “
What it really means is that the GPUs will finally have enough bandwidth to comfortably handle 4K. In a world where even the $ 1,200 RTX 2080 Ti struggles to hit 60 frames per second at 4K, GDDR6X is crucial to breaking that barrier.
