What areas tend to see the most benefit from faster video memory?

Polish3d

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2005
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So far it looks like my XTX ocs great on memory, and I'm working the core up but it hasn't gone as quickly as the memory. I am at about 710/880 core/mem at the moment... I was wondering what areas typically benefit from faster memory speeds? I was comparing some of ATs XTX reviews where they showed cards with the same core speeds but different memory speeds and in many cases there was a fairly significant gain in performance from faster memory... not a surprise, but what areas does it tend to benefit the most?
 

redbox

Golden Member
Nov 12, 2005
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I believe that memory speed affects textures in game, as they have to be loaded into video memory. The higher the resolution the more texture they have to processe. So if you have some high texture resolution packs for your games you should see an improvement there.
 

beggerking

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Jan 15, 2006
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Overall speed benefits from faster memory..

memory is used to store data, GPU grab data from memory to process them.
The faster your memory can read and write information, the faster the data can be transfered to GPU and be processed.

If GPU is slow, faster memory won't help because most of the time memory will be waiting for GPU. likewise with slow memory, GPU will have to wait for data from memory before the GPU can process the data. so a 100/1000 card will be slower than a 500/500 card because the GPU simply couldn't process data fast enough.
 

JBT

Lifer
Nov 28, 2001
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Originally posted by: beggerking
Overall speed benefits from faster memory..

memory is used to store data, GPU grab data from memory to process them.
The faster your memory can read and write information, the faster the data can be transfered to GPU and be processed.

If GPU is slow, faster memory won't help because most of the time memory will be waiting for GPU. likewise with slow memory, GPU will have to wait for data from memory before the GPU can process the data. so a 100/1000 card will be slower than a 500/500 card because the GPU simply couldn't process data fast enough.

uhh so having fast memory + fast GPU is most benificial right?
 

redbox

Golden Member
Nov 12, 2005
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Originally posted by: beggerking
Overall speed benefits from faster memory..

memory is used to store data, GPU grab data from memory to process them.
The faster your memory can read and write information, the faster the data can be transfered to GPU and be processed.

If GPU is slow, faster memory won't help because most of the time memory will be waiting for GPU. likewise with slow memory, GPU will have to wait for data from memory before the GPU can process the data. so a 100/1000 card will be slower than a 500/500 card because the GPU simply couldn't process data fast enough.

Yep. I was wondering though does the memory hold everything beggerking? I.E. vertex information, geometry, and the like? Or doesn it mainly hold texture information?
 

beggerking

Golden Member
Jan 15, 2006
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redbox, memory holds data, it doesn't distinguish them as us human...

yes. all data needs to be in memory before processed.
 

Munky

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Feb 5, 2005
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A lot of what video memory holds depends on how the developer coded the app. It can hold textures, shaders, vertex data, various offscreen rendering buffers, and more. For best performance the developers would often want to store as much rendering related data as possible in video mem. Also AA puts additional load on the video mem. So even if your core doesnt OC much you will still get improvement from OC'ing the vmem.
 

SonicIce

Diamond Member
Apr 12, 2004
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I wonder if both core and memory are equal speeds, will anything benefit? For instance would 700/700 be faster than 700/701? Maybe it's too small to tell?