In context: Graphics cards with more than 16GB of memory have only gotten more expensive this year, so it’s no surprise that modders keep trying to double the RTX 2080 Ti’s VRAM to 22GB. A new round of benchmarks now shows what upgrading an 8-year-old GPU actually brings. The results indicate that what matters most is whether a workload ran out of memory in the first place.
When PC Games Hardware tested a 22GB card borrowed from a reader, it intentionally looked for problems. The outlet picked nine of the most memory-hungry games it knows of and maxed them out. It’s also acknowledged that almost every game that left it out will run just fine on the standard 11GB, which is good news for anyone still using a regular 2080 Ti.
Even in this hand-picked lineup, 1440p with DLSS quality barely separated the two cards. Only Flight Simulator 2024 and Spider-Man 2 exceeded the 11GB mark, as both stream massive open worlds, from the globe-spanning scenery of Flight Simulator to New York in Spider-Man 2. In both of these cases, the stock card ran about 20% slower and stuttered when shuffling data into system RAM.
The gap only opened up when the store moved to 4K, with DLSS performance and FSR frame generation on top. Flight Simulator 2024 jumped from 30fps to 52fps, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on the 11GB card crashed to the desktop every time.
Still, these are demanding settings for such an old card, and even with the additional memory, not every game ran smoothly. When gaming, it is primarily the additional VRAM that determines whether a demanding setup runs at all, and not whether everyday settings become faster.
The outlet’s AI image test initially pointed in the same direction. In the most difficult scene, the 22GB card took over 200 seconds less to rewrite a prompt with a language model and render the first image than a factory overclocked 11GB card. However, a 16GB RTX 5070 Ti completed the same task in about 85 seconds.
One reason for this is that the newer card supports the compact FP8 format in hardware. Turing has to use FP16, so the same model takes up significantly more memory. In practice, the 16GB of a newer card may be larger than the 22GB of an older card.
This leaves the mod in a pretty tight spot. Pre-made cards from an eBay store in Hong Kong sold for around $500. In return, buyers get an old card with a very loud fan cooler and a foreign soldering point. The outlet warned that improper soldering can lead to errors that don’t appear until weeks later.
For people who already own a 2080 Ti and are running workloads that simply need more space, the math looks cheaper. For example, a repair shop in Japan doubles the memory of an existing card for about $282. This option could only become more tempting as Zotac’s parent company PC Partner expects the supply of entry-level graphics cards to become even tighter as memory prices continue to rise.
