Enthusiasts Upgrade GeForce GTX 970 to 8GB GDDR5 – Some Memory Still Slowed Down, But Performance Doubled

Brazilian enthusiasts have modified a GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, increasing its video memory from 4 to 8 GB. The accelerator’s performance has doubled in synthetic tests.

Image source: YouTube / Paulo Gomes

In September 2014, Nvidia made one of the biggest mistakes in its history. It released the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card and advertised it as an accelerator with 4 GB of memory. However, the card did not provide full bandwidth across the entire 256-bit memory bus. In reality, the card’s memory pool was divided into two groups: 3.5 and 0.5 GB. At the same time, the second memory group worked at only 1/7 of the declared speed.

Nvidia even had to pay GeForce GTX 970 owners $30 to settle the lawsuit. It’s been 11 years since the GeForce GTX 970 Maxwell-based card was released, but the card is still supported by Nvidia’s latest graphics drivers.

Brazilian enthusiasts Paulo Gomes, Jefferson Silva, and Felipe Triana decided to breathe new life into the GeForce GTX 970 by significantly increasing its video memory. However, this modification did not solve the problem of slow memory – only 7 out of 8 GB worked at full speed.

The video card’s native 512 MB GDDR5 memory chips with a speed of 7 Gbit/s were removed and replaced with 1 GB chips with a speed of 8 Gbit/s per contact. If before the modification the card scored 800 points in the Unigine Superposition 8K benchmark, then after increasing the memory volume its result almost doubled – up to 1500 points.

«We took a GTX 970 4GB, released in 2014, and did some experiments with it. This card had the same problems as the much later GeForce RTX 3070. Despite being equipped with high-density memory, the card did not take advantage of this. If it were otherwise, the GPU could last much longer,” the enthusiasts commented on their experiment.

Obviously, such a modification has no practical use, since the card itself is already outdated and has no value even on the secondary market. However, the experiment shows that increasing the memory capacity can significantly extend the life cycle of a particular GPU. Despite this, even in 2025, video card manufacturers continue to release new models with 8 GB of VRAM, fully aware that this volume is no longer enough for games at a resolution higher than 1080p, and users will have to upgrade quite soon.