Is memory bandwidth really that important?

[Lcarvone]

OK, I am obviously missing something but again I have never been a gamer so here it goes.

I have a motherboard that has an AGP 4X slot which means a theoretical maximum throughput of ~ 1.0 GB/sec. I need to get a low end video card and one I am looking at has a 64 bit memory bus with an actual memory bandwidth of 3052 MB/sec or ~3 GB/sec.

All I have read is that "64 bit is bad and 128 is better"...... "stay away from 64 bit memory versions of this video card!". But based upon the limits of AGP 4X (and 8X for that matter) does it really matter since the 64 bit memory bandwidth is way over what a AGP 4X bus can handle?

Someone please educate this old computer geek.......

 

[gac009]

The gpu communicates with the on-board ram faster than it dose with the cpu.

 

[Todd33]

Main memory -> Video memory (AGP) is not a huge bottleneck if you load the whole level at once. Manipulating the textures by the GPU in video memory is a huge bottleneck. While you spin around in BF2, the GPU is doing massive calculations that include shaders, AA, AF, misc filtering, geometry transforms, etc. The AGP bus is transfering very little at this point to the GPU (small amounts of geometry).

 

[gac009]

^much better answer

 

[Lcarvone]

OK....much better...the fog has lifted. I had it set in my mind for some reason it was strictly a data movement/bus issue within the system itself; not something "internal" to the GPU and its related memory. Thanks folks