Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti remains the most powerful graphics card in the GeForce lineup, and along with its hallowed status comes the equally formidable Founders Edition price tag of $1,199. But that hasn't stopped the effort to make bigger, better, and even more expensive graphics cards. In the true spirit of one-upmanship, MSI now plans to be the first manufacturer to offer 16Gbps memory on its enthusiast-grade RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Z Trio.

According to MSI's news article, this memory swap is expected to provide a 5% performance boost over the same 14Gbps RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio. Both have the same GPU boost clock of 1,755 MHz, the same cooling solution, and both remain sturdy designs with a few blown screws. However, the Gaming Z Trio's memory is slightly ahead of the 14Gbps Gaming X Trio.

That 5% may be enough for the Gaming Z Trio to outperform even Nvidia's super-smart Titan RTX, an inference card built for AI and deep learning that is more or less an RTX 2080 Ti with all the extras.

With ample memory and a slight advantage in CUDA and clock speed, the Titan RTX has long been slightly faster than the Founders Edition RTX 2080 Ti. However, third-party coolers that allow Nvidia's GeForce GPUs to really boost frequencies (thanks to Nvidia's GPU Boost technology) and generous factory overclocking have reduced the gap to just a few frames.

If MSI's numbers are to be believed, the move to 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory should bring the performance of the very competitive Gaming X up to 16. Doing so would allow the Gaming Z Trio to outperform the Titan RTX by a small margin in-game.

The value of memory bandwidth cannot be understated either; take the GTX 1660 Super as an example. It is identical to the GTX 1660 in almost every respect, but upgrading the memory from GDDR5 to GDDR6 has resulted in a 15-20% performance increase.

Perhaps that is why MSI is keen to release an updated Turing card a year and a half after its initial release.