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Economic reasons aside — there's historical precedent for Nvidia creating arbitrary limitations in software (and sometimes in dedicated hardware) for their card
by _verandaguy 6y ago
Economic reasons aside — there's historical precedent for Nvidia creating arbitrary limitations in software (and sometimes in dedicated hardware) for their cards.
Famously, many discrete GeForce cards don't play well with virtualized OSes, and there have been some hacky ways to bypass that. This is done because only Quadro cards are blessed by Nvidia to run in "enterprise" environments. Besides this soft lock, there's usually no architectural limitation preventing GeForce cards from working with virtualized OSes if the hypervisor can provide passthrough.
All that to say, it wouldn't be the most shocking news in the world if it turned out they prevent this kind of VRAM modding.
- babypuncher 6y agoI'm having trouble imagining a world where the cost of this operation is less than the cost difference between a 3070 and an equivalent 16GB card. Buying the ridiculously overpriced 3090 is still going to be cheaper and not come with any of the associated risk (invalid warranty, potential future driver/bios compatibility problems).
- _verandaguy 6y agoIn this specific case, I think it's more about if you can do it rather than if it makes sense. It's a fun challenge, and if you can spare the cash, it does inform the community a bit more about how modern Nvidia cards react to this kind of mod. A big fraction of Hackaday's content is this kind of fun modding that might not make immediate economic sense.