Micron has officially announced its GDDR7 video RAM, outlining how fast it’ll perform, and underlining the VRAM’s gaming chops too – which is of particular interest seeing as this is the memory rumored to be on-board Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards.
Yes, the grapevine reckons that RTX 5000 GPUs will be equipped with GDDR7, and now we know what to expect from Micron’s take on these memory modules.
Micron’s GDDR7 will facilitate speeds of up to 32Gb/s and up to 1.5TB/s of bandwidth, which as the manufacturer points out is 60% more bandwidth than GDDR6, so it’s quite a leap.
We’re also told to anticipate a better than 50% improvement in power-efficiency with GDDR7 video RAM compared to GDDR6, so that’s good news, too (especially for next-gen mobile GPUs inside the best gaming laptops, of course).
Although we’d fully expect some robust advancements across both performance and efficiency with any next-gen standard, these are some major steps onwards and upwards.
Micron specifically calls out the benefits to gaming GPUs in its announcement, too, indicating that GDDR7 should hit a better than 30% improvement in frames per second for gaming, both ray tracing and rasterization, as an average across 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions.
Boosts in the latter department, 4K, will be more pronounced, and ray tracing at 4K (maxed out with ultra details) should see a huge leap of 3x over GDDR6 according to Micron (and indeed a hike of 50% over GDDR6X, the faster spin on current-gen video RAM).
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(Image credit: Micron)
Analysis: All on track for Blackwell – but there’s a worry here, namely pricing
This all sounds seriously promising for the next generation of graphics cards, though Micron isn’t the only game in town. Samsung already announced its own GDDR7 VRAM a couple of months back, in 32Gbps and 28Gbps flavors – so expect that to be equally nippy.
With these next-gen VRAM revelations, everything looks on track for the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 to launch later this year, which are Blackwell graphics cards rumored to use GDDR7. Indeed, the whole Blackwell range of GPUs may run with GDDR7 eventually, though other products aren’t expected until 2025 (and it remains to be seen if that particular piece of speculation is true).
The most recent rumor regarding the RTX 5090 – which may come out slightly after the RTX 5080, if some chatter is correct – suggests that the Blackwell flagship will sport a 448-bit memory bus and 28GB of GDDR7 VRAM (though previous speculation floated the idea of 32GB, even).
The downside of a huge loadout of cutting-edge video RAM would be what this might do to the price, with the RTX 5090 already expected to be seriously wallet-damaging, even before this chatter. Intriguingly, there are also suggestions the flagship could be considerably trimmer than the RTX 4090, which again would lend itself towards imagining an even bigger premium whacked on the price for this next-gen kingpin GPU.
It’s possible we might see a mighty RTX 5090 flagship with a mighty price tag, and a more affordable, but modest, RTX 5080, this time around, or that’s the way the rumor winds are currently blowing.
Via Wccftech