Why has there never been a gpu that you can upgrade the memory on? Would it be that hard? I would happily add another 1gb to my 560ti if was possible. There is probably very good reasons why this isn't possible but in principle it seems to make sense to me.
I had some Matrox PCI cards with upgradeable VRAM, I sold them for postage recently in the mp. A couple if Milleniums and a G200. Sent from my HTC Desire S using Tapatalk 2
Because GPUs all handle memory differently (even sometimes among members of the same family) and because of differing memory bus widths, it's almost impossible to standardize an upgrade. And custom ones for each card wouldn't make back the R&D money, so there's no fiscally good reason to do it.
- Different memory controllers on different GPUs. - Different types of memory for different generations of cards. - Added expense of producing the swappable memory modules and putting the sockets for them on cards. - New cards with new GPUs and more memory mean more $ profit for manufacturers. - One more PoF (point of failure) on already complex modern graphics cards. - Added space required for the swappable modules on already crowded cards - low profile BGA/SMD chip footprint vs wider and taller DIL chips with the added height of a socket. - Despite popular belief, still only a silly small percentage of PC users are enthusiasts who would tackle a simple task like changing/adding RAM. Plenty of reasons! The cards that allowed it in the early days were back when there was one type of video memory, one type of memory controller etc. With the variety of current cards and the rate at which they go from high end to mid range, it just wouldn't be feasible.
This is the reason I asked the question so I could learn the reasons why and why not. Money being probably the top of the list.
