Benefits of 24 GB in Productivity

One of the key features setting the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti apart from any other consumer graphics card in the market is its incredible 24 GB dedicated memory. NVIDIA achieved this much memory without compromising on performance, with the highest 21 Gbps data rates, widest 384-bit bus widths, and highest 1 TB/s memory bandwidth on tap. This is NVIDIA's fastest graphics memory solution in the Ampere series. The professional A6000 GPU has up to 48 GB of memory, but it is conventional 16 Gbps GDDR6 for the sake of ECC support. The GDDR6X memory found in NVIDIA Ampere GPUs is an innovation co-developed by NVIDIA and Micron Technology.


So what does one really do with 24 GB of memory? If you've read our GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review, you'll know that despite just 12 GB of memory, the GPU is almost as fast as the RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 Ti does not just have faster memory than the RTX 3090, but also more shaders, higher clock-speeds, and significantly higher power limits to sustain boost frequencies. Even NVIDIA believes that one doesn't really need 24 GB of memory for gaming, and hence mooted the original RTX 3080 as its flagship for this generation.

NVIDIA considers the RTX 3090 Ti to be more than just a gaming graphics card. The incredible 24 GB memory and NVIDIA GeForce Studio drivers combination is designed to give the RTX 3090 Ti some serious professional-visualization chops, especially when working on 3D content-creation projects with large data sets.

OTOY OctaneRender is able to utilize the 24 GB memory to draw large 3D scenes, including with RTX ray tracing acceleration. The advantage of 24 GB is in storing the entire scene data on the video memory to minimize or cut out out-of-core data, which has to be fetched from main memory or disk storage, making the process an order of magnitude slower.

Blender is one of the most popular 3D authoring and render software, and the Blender Cycles path-tracing renderer utilizes NVIDIA OptiX to accelerate interactive and final frame rendering with incredible lighting effects over multiple instances of Blender. Something like this would fail if attempted on the RTX 3080 Ti with its 12 GB video memory since you would run out of memory.

Video editing software DaVinci Resolve will particularly benefit from the 24 GB memory of the RTX 3090 Ti, especially in 8K Redcode RAW projects, where you're dealing with 8K uncompressed video frames that take up enormous amounts of memory. NVIDIA assesses that it takes 24 GB to smoothly work with 8K editing, color-correction, VFX, and post-production, and that the 12 GB or 10 GB solutions on the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080 will run into out-of-memory errors.