**A Witcher 3 Performance Test with Custom 8GB GTX 980**

In this test, we put a custom-built GTX 980 to the test, featuring 8GB of VRAM instead of the standard 4GB. The original model was a reference Asus Strix OC, and our custom build is just that - a unique take on the popular GPU. We ran The Witcher 3 in high settings with TAA and SSAA enabled, pushing the graphics card to its limits.

We were pleased to see that the custom 8GB GTX 980 held up well even in the most demanding areas of the game, still managing to maintain an average of 66 FPS. While we could push things to ultra settings without too much trouble, there was a noticeable dip below 60 FPS in some busier sections. The one percent low was at 54 FPS, and the point one percent low was at 51 FPS - still respectable, but showing that even with more VRAM, the card isn't invincible.

**Fortnite Performance at 1080p**

Next up, we tested Fortnite at 1080p with 100% scaling and TAA enabled. To remain competitive, we recommend turning down some settings to avoid dipping below 60 FPS. Even so, the custom GTX 980 still managed to hold its own, averaging a smooth 74 FPS with a one percent low of 59 FPS and a point one percent low of 49 FPS.

**Comparison Results**

To give you an idea of how our custom GTX 980 stacks up against more standard GPUs, we've put together some comparison results. We used the same Asus Strix OC model as a reference point, but with only 4GB of VRAM. The differences are quite noticeable, especially in games that are already pushing the limits of what's possible on a lower-end GPU.

Starting with Cyberpunk, our custom GTX 980 managed to edge out the standard 4GB card by an average of two frames per second, although this improvement wasn't uniform across all percentile lows. In contrast, Red Dead Redemption 2 saw similar performance from both cards, while Forza Horizon 5 was slightly more demanding on the custom build.

In Hogwarts Legacy and Marvel Spider-Man Remastered, our custom GTX 980 performed within margin of error territory of the standard 4GB card, although there were some small differences in terms of frame times. However, The Last of Us proved to be a tougher nut to crack for even the custom 8GB card, with an average frame rate of only 43 FPS on the standard 4GB model.

**Conclusion**

Overall, we're impressed with how well our custom GTX 980 performed in these tests, especially considering that it's just a unique take on a popular GPU. While it may not offer significant advantages over more standard GPUs in every case, there are certainly areas where it shines - particularly when it comes to handling more VRAM-intensive games.

As the gaming landscape continues to shift towards more demanding titles and increasing VRAM requirements, we're excited to see how our custom GTX 980 will hold up. For now, though, we think this is a great example of what can be achieved with a bit of creativity and a good understanding of GPU capabilities.

**Final Thoughts**

That's all for today's test - I hope you've enjoyed it! If you did leave a like down below, please do so - if not, well, maybe next time. And if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, what are you waiting for? We've got plenty more content in store for you, from GPU benchmarks to game reviews and everything in between. Thanks for watching, and we'll catch you all in the next one!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to another video now in today's one we're taking a look at something pretty unique a one-off GTX 980. now when I purchased this on eBay I thought it may have been an engineering sample because it was described as a 980 with eight gigabytes of vram and as you know any model GTX 980 no matter the card you buy ships with just four if you want more vram the 980 TI is available with six gigs but nowhere in the world exists a 980 with eight gigs and the whole thing was a bit of a mystery to me especially as the description was quite vague so after it arrived I got in contact with the seller and I also got in contact with Nvidia who told me two similar things see at first I thought this was an engineering sample and so my concerns were around the legality of owning this and of course uploading a video turns out though that this is just a bit of a passion project in fact what the seller had done is actually replaced the memory themselves and so this card has ended up with eight gigs of vram as opposed to the standard four the memory chip model numbers the little serial numbers whatever you want to call them are different from the number stated in a lot of 980 reviews some of the reviews went into detail about the memory chips used and this doesn't match up with any of them this is a pretty unique product for that reason probably the only one in the world unless someone else has decided to do the same thing and although I found it pretty impressive I don't think Nvidia shared my enthusiasm I find this car pretty interesting nonetheless and today I want to see how it performs so we'll get into that first and then we'll discuss is performance in comparison to a standard 4 gig GPU okay so this 980 is basically the same spec wise we've got the same bus width the same memory bandwidth the only thing that's changed is the amount of vram 8 gigs instead of four starting off with our first game cyberpunk 2077 and here we have the medium crowds and textures with everything else set to lowest all of today's games were tested at 1080p the 980 is still a very capable card of course providing you a realistic with your expectations and in cyberpunk we saw 56fps with a one percent load of 45 and a 0.1 note of 42. Red Dead Redemption 2 then with the ultra textures and everything else set to medium gave us 57 FPS on average with a one percent lower 47 and a 0.1 percent low of 45. for Forza Horizon 5 we use the high preset with TAA enabled by default for an average of a very nice 69. the one percent low is 56 and the 0.1 percent low was 55 so no stata here or any frame drops to speak of with this one one in Hogwarts Legacy which is one of the more demanding games tested today at 1080p medium with TAA set to low We Saw 52 FPS on average with a one set of 41 and a 0.1 low of 31. Spider-Man with the medium preset and TAA gave a 60 to FPS with the 8 gig 960 980 sorry 47 FPS is a one percent low and a 0.1 percent low of 42. so again another nice result with some consistent frame times here next up for the last of us at 1080p with the lowest preset 44 FPS was the average with a one percent note of 38 and a point one percent low of 35. you can see in games like this they do try and allocate more vram and because we have it with this card more vram is being allocated but I think one of the bigger limitations is the actual power of the 980 the actual performance it can offer vram doesn't necessarily help him in a Witcher 3 with 1080p in the high preset with taau and ssao we saw 66 FPS we can push things to Ultra but there will be more dips below 60. 54 was the one percent low and the point one percent low was 51. so even in and around those busier areas the game still held up fairly well finally then we have fortnite at 1080p with 100 rest scaling and TAA I'd recommend turning things down for fortnite in order to remain at your most competitive but it certainly looks good at high I must say even if it's probably not worth playing at such setting 74 FPS on average with a one percent of 59 and 0.1 percent low of 49. now then let's get into some comparison results using some of the more demanding games tested today okay so I've thrown together this little XL graph this table here I apologize that the formatting isn't uh the best but Excel isn't something I use very often as you can probably tell so the standard GTX 980 that I tested a while ago was the Asus strix OC model bear that in mind this one is just a custom reference model with eight gigs of vram instead of four I've thrown a few games into this the ones that I have comparative figures for and I thought we'd go through them now so starting with cyberpunk and we saw an average of 54 FPS with the 4 gig980 a one percent of 40 and a point I'm sitting over 36 with our custom 8 gig card we saw an improvement to the average of two frames per second but where things improved the most well with those percentile lows this was a more consistent experience with the card that has the extra vram added now this definitely wasn't the story throughout as you can see for the next few results with red dead 59 FPS average with the 4GB standard card 57 with the 8 gig card this could just be due to the reference model being clocked lower of calls but that can only compare what I had on hand in Forza Horizon 5 the averages were the same and the percentile lows were pretty much identical give or take a margin of error um Hogwarts Legacy 52 FPS for the standard 4 gig980 with the one percent of 40 and a 0.1 low of 35 again the Figures were pretty similar if anything the 0.1 percent low with the 8 gig card came in a little bit lower for Marvel Spider-Man remastered 62 FPS on average with a 4 gig 980 still a very respectable card in 2023 in my opinion the one percent though was 47 and the 0.1 percent lower 41. similar figures with our custom 980 GPU with eight gigs of RAM here um the 0.1 figure was slightly higher but again I call this within margin of error territory now The Last of Us is the last game I tested for comparison here and just like cyberpunk this can be very demanding all of the above gains can but this one is particularly demanding when it comes to that vram utilization so 43 frames per second for a standard 4 gig980 the custom 8 gig card did one FPS better margin of error territory but where we saw the most notable changes was with those placento lows once again in fact it was that point one percent low where we saw quite a big difference in compare comparison to that original 980 35 in comparison to 26 so I think going forward as games start to become more and more vram intensive this custom 8 gig card May hold on a little bit better but for the most part in gaming tests anyway I didn't see anything that made me think wow there's a significant difference here but I do admire what the seller has done to this 980 I think it was a pretty cool passion project and I think going forward it'll be interesting to see just how games differ in their performance when using an 8 gig 980 in comparison to the 4 gig card so that's something I'll have to keep an eye on moving forward I think all that's left to say now though is thank you very much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this look at this one-off custom unique GTX 988 gigabyte if you did leave a like down below leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and for anyone watching from Nvidia nvidia's legal team anything like that if any problems do arise with this video just let me know and uh I don't know remove it if I have to I guess they've they've given me the all clear so everything should be good but yeah I think we're okay but there we go thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next onehello everyone and welcome to another video now in today's one we're taking a look at something pretty unique a one-off GTX 980. now when I purchased this on eBay I thought it may have been an engineering sample because it was described as a 980 with eight gigabytes of vram and as you know any model GTX 980 no matter the card you buy ships with just four if you want more vram the 980 TI is available with six gigs but nowhere in the world exists a 980 with eight gigs and the whole thing was a bit of a mystery to me especially as the description was quite vague so after it arrived I got in contact with the seller and I also got in contact with Nvidia who told me two similar things see at first I thought this was an engineering sample and so my concerns were around the legality of owning this and of course uploading a video turns out though that this is just a bit of a passion project in fact what the seller had done is actually replaced the memory themselves and so this card has ended up with eight gigs of vram as opposed to the standard four the memory chip model numbers the little serial numbers whatever you want to call them are different from the number stated in a lot of 980 reviews some of the reviews went into detail about the memory chips used and this doesn't match up with any of them this is a pretty unique product for that reason probably the only one in the world unless someone else has decided to do the same thing and although I found it pretty impressive I don't think Nvidia shared my enthusiasm I find this car pretty interesting nonetheless and today I want to see how it performs so we'll get into that first and then we'll discuss is performance in comparison to a standard 4 gig GPU okay so this 980 is basically the same spec wise we've got the same bus width the same memory bandwidth the only thing that's changed is the amount of vram 8 gigs instead of four starting off with our first game cyberpunk 2077 and here we have the medium crowds and textures with everything else set to lowest all of today's games were tested at 1080p the 980 is still a very capable card of course providing you a realistic with your expectations and in cyberpunk we saw 56fps with a one percent load of 45 and a 0.1 note of 42. Red Dead Redemption 2 then with the ultra textures and everything else set to medium gave us 57 FPS on average with a one percent lower 47 and a 0.1 percent low of 45. for Forza Horizon 5 we use the high preset with TAA enabled by default for an average of a very nice 69. the one percent low is 56 and the 0.1 percent low was 55 so no stata here or any frame drops to speak of with this one one in Hogwarts Legacy which is one of the more demanding games tested today at 1080p medium with TAA set to low We Saw 52 FPS on average with a one set of 41 and a 0.1 low of 31. Spider-Man with the medium preset and TAA gave a 60 to FPS with the 8 gig 960 980 sorry 47 FPS is a one percent low and a 0.1 percent low of 42. so again another nice result with some consistent frame times here next up for the last of us at 1080p with the lowest preset 44 FPS was the average with a one percent note of 38 and a point one percent low of 35. you can see in games like this they do try and allocate more vram and because we have it with this card more vram is being allocated but I think one of the bigger limitations is the actual power of the 980 the actual performance it can offer vram doesn't necessarily help him in a Witcher 3 with 1080p in the high preset with taau and ssao we saw 66 FPS we can push things to Ultra but there will be more dips below 60. 54 was the one percent low and the point one percent low was 51. so even in and around those busier areas the game still held up fairly well finally then we have fortnite at 1080p with 100 rest scaling and TAA I'd recommend turning things down for fortnite in order to remain at your most competitive but it certainly looks good at high I must say even if it's probably not worth playing at such setting 74 FPS on average with a one percent of 59 and 0.1 percent low of 49. now then let's get into some comparison results using some of the more demanding games tested today okay so I've thrown together this little XL graph this table here I apologize that the formatting isn't uh the best but Excel isn't something I use very often as you can probably tell so the standard GTX 980 that I tested a while ago was the Asus strix OC model bear that in mind this one is just a custom reference model with eight gigs of vram instead of four I've thrown a few games into this the ones that I have comparative figures for and I thought we'd go through them now so starting with cyberpunk and we saw an average of 54 FPS with the 4 gig980 a one percent of 40 and a point I'm sitting over 36 with our custom 8 gig card we saw an improvement to the average of two frames per second but where things improved the most well with those percentile lows this was a more consistent experience with the card that has the extra vram added now this definitely wasn't the story throughout as you can see for the next few results with red dead 59 FPS average with the 4GB standard card 57 with the 8 gig card this could just be due to the reference model being clocked lower of calls but that can only compare what I had on hand in Forza Horizon 5 the averages were the same and the percentile lows were pretty much identical give or take a margin of error um Hogwarts Legacy 52 FPS for the standard 4 gig980 with the one percent of 40 and a 0.1 low of 35 again the Figures were pretty similar if anything the 0.1 percent low with the 8 gig card came in a little bit lower for Marvel Spider-Man remastered 62 FPS on average with a 4 gig 980 still a very respectable card in 2023 in my opinion the one percent though was 47 and the 0.1 percent lower 41. similar figures with our custom 980 GPU with eight gigs of RAM here um the 0.1 figure was slightly higher but again I call this within margin of error territory now The Last of Us is the last game I tested for comparison here and just like cyberpunk this can be very demanding all of the above gains can but this one is particularly demanding when it comes to that vram utilization so 43 frames per second for a standard 4 gig980 the custom 8 gig card did one FPS better margin of error territory but where we saw the most notable changes was with those placento lows once again in fact it was that point one percent low where we saw quite a big difference in compare comparison to that original 980 35 in comparison to 26 so I think going forward as games start to become more and more vram intensive this custom 8 gig card May hold on a little bit better but for the most part in gaming tests anyway I didn't see anything that made me think wow there's a significant difference here but I do admire what the seller has done to this 980 I think it was a pretty cool passion project and I think going forward it'll be interesting to see just how games differ in their performance when using an 8 gig 980 in comparison to the 4 gig card so that's something I'll have to keep an eye on moving forward I think all that's left to say now though is thank you very much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this look at this one-off custom unique GTX 988 gigabyte if you did leave a like down below leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and for anyone watching from Nvidia nvidia's legal team anything like that if any problems do arise with this video just let me know and uh I don't know remove it if I have to I guess they've they've given me the all clear so everything should be good but yeah I think we're okay but there we go thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one\n"