What does increasing the mem clock do?

[tigersty1e]

I know increasing the core clock makes your card faster and increases your framerates, but what about the mem clock?

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: tigersty1e
I know increasing the core clock makes your card faster and increases your framerates, but what about the mem clock?

Same effect.

 

[Stumps]

it increases the memery speed of the video card which increase the cards memory bandwidth...which gives a boost in performance...but it all depends on wether or not the GPU can use the extra bandwidth, if it can't then the performance increase is very small, if it can well...the increase is larger.

pretty straight forward.

 

[tigersty1e]

Originally posted by: Stumps
it increases the memery speed of the video card which increase the cards memory bandwidth...which gives a boost in performance...but it all depends on wether or not the GPU can use the extra bandwidth, if it can't then the performance increase is very small, if it can well...the increase is larger.

pretty straight forward.

How do you know if your core can handle the mem?

Right now I sit at 350 (core) and 700 (mem). If I can only increase the core to 380, should I only increase the mem to 760?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: tigersty1e

Originally posted by: Stumps
it increases the memery speed of the video card which increase the cards memory bandwidth...which gives a boost in performance...but it all depends on wether or not the GPU can use the extra bandwidth, if it can't then the performance increase is very small, if it can well...the increase is larger.

pretty straight forward.

How do you know if your core can handle the mem?

Right now I sit at 350 (core) and 700 (mem). If I can only increase the core to 380, should I only increase the mem to 760?

They're independent. Increasing either will help you, but increasing one really far but not the other will produce diminishing returns. Usually at stock speeds they will be relatively balanced (so keeping the same ratio of core/memory will be optimal). Certain cards, however (like the old 6600GT) are short on bandwidth at stock settings and will benefit significantly from just memory overclocking.

Super-fast memory won't help much if the GPU core is really slow; conversely, a super-fast GPU core will be bandwidth-limited if the memory isn't fast enough. Memory bandwidth also becomes more important when you want to use AA/AF, and when you run with high quality textures and pixel/vertex shaders.

 

[yacoub]

Testing is the only way to be sure.

 

[gobucks]

overclocking the core tends to help most at lower resolutions without eye candy. overclocking the memory tends to see the best results at high resolutions with lots of eye candy, where the memory bandwidth is usually the limiting factor.

i agree with mathias99 in that midrange cards strapped for memory bandwidth tend to see the biggest boosts from overclocking the memory. While this was true for the 6600GT, it is especially true for the newer 8600GTX and upcoming HD2600XT cards, since their respective companies keep hampering midrange card performance by sticking with a 128-bit memory bus even though their high end cards are up to 384 and 512-bit, respectively.