The GPU already has DMA to system RAM. If you're going to make the VRAM as slow as system RAM, then a UMA makes more sense than throwing more memory chips on the GPU.
Re:Intel's Battlemage Architecture
by 1W6MIC49CYX9GAP on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @12:30PM
(#43027552)
Why would you slow down VRAM?
Good point. I misunderstood the situation. I figured doubling the VRAM size at the same bus width would halve the bandwidth.
Instead, it appears entirely possible to double VRAM size (starting from current amounts) while keeping the bus width and bandwidth the same (cf. 4060 Ti 8GB vs. 4060 Ti 16GB). And, since that bandwidth is already much higher than system RAM (e.g. 128-bit GDDR6 at 288 GB/s vs DDR5 at 32-64 GB/s), it seems very useful to do so, though I'd imagine games wouldn't benefit as much as compute would.
Actually, it's compute workloads that love bandwidth, they just have hard thresholds on how much memory they need.
You can see this with overclocking VRAM. Greatly benefits mining, slightly or even negatively benefits gaming workloads.
This extends to system RAM too, most applications will see more benefit from better access times rather than higher MT/s.
But if you just want to double the memory without increasing the total memory bandwidth, isn't it a good deal simpler? What's 1 more bit on the address bus for a 256 bit bus?