Nvidia has long been stingy with its VRAM offerings, especially in the recent RTX graphics card generations. The gaming giant was said to be planning to offer its highest amount of VRAM so far with the RTX 50 Super series, but this lineup seems to have been cancelled in the wake of rising memory prices.

At the same time, a repair shop seems to be using this situation to its advantage. This shop is currently offering VRAM upgrades for existing GPUs starting from $25/1GB of memory.

Why it matters: 16GB has become the new standard for modern graphics cards, but many are still stuck with GPUs limited to just 8GB or 12GB of memory due to rising prices.

VRAM Upgrade Shop In Japan Received 200 Units of Samsung GDDR6 2GB Modules | Image via Twitter

Japanese vendor “AI to GPU Expert” is using the famous RTX 2080 Ti to highlight its capabilities of effectively doubling memory from 11GB to 22GB. The vendor is also selling preconfigured GPUs with additional VRAM on Mercari.

Over on the shop, curious PC gamers and buyers can find RTX 2080 Ti 22GB cards listed for as little as $800. Similarly, RTX 3080 20GB GPUs are available here for around $700, an impressive price in the current era.

As for the cost of upgrading existing GPUs, the shop is currently charging around $25/1GB of memory and $12.84/1GB for those buying 22GB of RAM altogether. Although the price is still not the most cost-effective, it can be quite enticing for those with RTX 2080 Ti GPUs already on hand.

These upgrades can also be extremely useful in modern games with higher VRAM requirements, especially since the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3080 are quite capable in pure rasterization to this day.

Needless to say, the mod also makes these GPUs more than capable of handling modern AI workloads.

The one caveat is that this upgrade is limited to specific GPUs. The RTX 2080 Ti is the most suitable of Nvidia’s GPUs for this upgrade, but the shop has listed similarly improved RTX 3080 and RTX 4080 graphics cards.