What's more important?

[cwos]

What's most important to consider when buying a new graphics card?

 

[JBT]

fill rate. Graphics memory barely means anything unless you have the fill rate to actually fill that memory up.

 

[cwos]

So a card with a higher fill rate and lower memory is better than a card with a lower fill rate but better memory?

 

[JBT]

having more memory does not mean BETTER memory. Often times with low end cards. They will put twice the memory on it even though it is slower MHz wise and then charge more for it.

Which card are we talking about specifically.

Originally posted by: cwos
So a card with a higher fill rate and lower memory is better than a card with a lower fill rate but better memory?

but yes ussually that is the case

 

[cwos]

A Gigabyte Radeon X600 Pro with 128Mb DDR memory and a fill rate of 1600 M/Pixels or a Sapphire Radeon X300 SE with 256Mb memory and a 1300 M/Pixel fill rate.
The X600 is the newer chipset so I assume its a better choice anyway?

 

[gac009]

^ what would a x300se do with all that memory anyway? if you set it at a high enough settings for the extra memory to be necessary the x300se would be at a crawl.

this isnt a perfect comparison but I think of it like this, would you want a pc with

A. AMD 64 3700 and 2 gig Ram

or

B. Sempron 2200 with 4 gigs Ram

 

[Amplifier]

decent comparison

 

[boran]

imho seeing the x300 a better example for B. would be a Duron 800 with 4 GB of ram

 

[JBT]

the x600 pro will SMOKE a x300

 

[trinibwoy]

If you are referring to conventional fillrate - then it is not the number you really care about. Maximum fillrate has been pretty unimportant for some time. Shader power and bandwidth are now a lot more important. Which is why the G70 has 24 shader pipelines but only 16 ROPs.

In either case, there is no advantage to having an excess of one or the other. If you are bandwidth limited you won't be able to enable AA without a massive performance hit (G70). If you're fillrate (shader) limited you won't be able to run future games at decent speed (NV40). Striking a good balance between the two is key.

And I don't agree with what is stated above. Having a theoretically high fillrate without the bandwidth to feed the pipes is useless. And that's exactly what you're seeing in the G70 benchmarks in older titles. It only shows it's stuff in very shader bound engines like F.E.A.R and UE3 (which are arguably the future of gaming).

 

[Munky]

^ I agree with the above post. Games are becoming increasingly heavy on shaders, which technically is not associated with neither fillrate nor memory. It means the number of vertex and pixel pipes in the card, and usually each pipe has it's own shader. IIRC the FX cards had a higher pixel fillrate than the r300, but because they only had 4 pipes vs. 8 pipes on the r300, that was one of the many reasons the FX cards could not keep up.

Pixel shaders is what's used most often for eye candy in games, so when a card has 16 or 24 pixel pipes, it means it has that many pixel shaders, and the more the better. Future games will use more complex shaders and more of them, so IMO it's the most important feature in a video card.

 

[VIAN]

Nope, the R300 had higher fillrate than the Nv40. However, the Nv40 did have a higher texelrate, but that meant very little because the texels became obsolete to shaders.

Hence, the R300 was more powerful.


To answer the OPs question. Both are important, but if I could choose which one to OC, it would have to be the fillrate, as the card will last longer. But if you treasure AA, then memory bandwidth is your guy.

The fillrate is still a good indication. The faster you run the pipes, the more shader calculations it can do.

 

[happy medium]

So how much fill rate do you need for a 128mb card and 256mb card is the question.

 

[Emultra]

Does anti-aliasing depend on the MB factor, the core clock, the memory clock, pixel pipelines or what?

Simple question asked, simple answer wanted.

 

[Pete]

What's more important? Graphics memory [size] or pixel fill rate
What's more important to you, nice textures or good framerates? Memory bandwidth is equally crucial. If that X300SE has only a 64-bit memory bus, the X600P and its 128-bit memory bus will simply crush it at any res above 640x480 16-bit. Neither card is that smart a purchase for current big-ticket games, though. Both cards' meager four pixel pipelines will probably have a hard time at even 1024x768 in newer, effects-laden games.

cwos, what's your budget, and what PC will you put the new card into? The Visiontek X600XT at Outpost for $70 + shipping is a great deal if the two cards you're looking at are around the same price, but it still seems relatively expensive compared to, say, a <$100 used 9700 Pro (which is, alas, AGP only). I'd think you can do better for not much more. I honestly don't know for sure, but this $100 6600 from ZZF may be faster in newer games due to its superior "fillrate" and shader power, despite its much slower memory clock (550 vs. 736MHz).

So how much fill rate do you need for a 128mb card and 256mb card is the question.
Depends on the game, on the resolution, on the IQ settings.... The simple answer is always "the more, the better." The best answer is to just find as many benchmarks of the cards you're interested in running the games you'll play at the settings you want (resolution, AA level, effects).

Does anti-aliasing depend on the MB factor, the core clock, the memory clock, pixel pipelines or what?
Current multi-sample AA mainly feeds on memory bandwidth--at least, compared to old-school super-sample AA, MSAA shifts the burden from the whole card ("fillrate" and bandwidth) to mainly bandwidth.

 

[BFG10K]

What's most important to consider when buying a new graphics card?

It depends what games you play and what settings you play them at.

 

[cwos]

Pricewise it's way better to get the X600 then, its not much more than the X300. I'm looking at cards available in New Zealand, and considering I'm at high school with a part-time job means I can't afford anything too flash. Even with the currency change, I think stuff over here is more expensive than in the U.S as well.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

I don't really understand this stuff most of the time...

Who cares what a specific spec of a card is?

Look at some benchmarks of the cards at the settings you intend to play your games at. Pick the one that's faster.

If a card manufacterer came out with a card with incredibly sucky specs on paper, but was able to beat the competition, I wouldn't care if it looked crappy on paper. I look at the bottom line - does it display what it's supposed to display, and how fast does it do it in FPS?

I don't care what it's doing behind the scenes. Most people here will tell you that the amount of ram on a videocard is a dumb spec to look at when picking out something. I don't understand why the same mentality applies to "pipelines" and such. Yeah, it's going to be a better indication of how the card will perform, but if you can get right to the punchline and see how it compares to other cards in FPS, then who cares what it's using?

Ok, I'm done now.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: YOyoYOhowsDAjello
I don't care what it's doing behind the scenes. Most people here will tell you that the amount of ram on a videocard is a dumb spec to look at when picking out something. I don't understand why the same mentality applies to "pipelines" and such. Yeah, it's going to be a better indication of how the card will perform, but if you can get right to the punchline and see how it compares to other cards in FPS, then who cares what it's using?

If a card had EXTRA-crappy specs and did 1280x1024 at AA/AF, I'd assume they put image quality cheats in there. I'd be suspicious.

Second of all not one card performs the same in any given game. The gap may widen in the future too. If you had a card with a 256-bit 256MB memory, and one with 128-bit 256MB, they might perform the same now in bottlenecked games. In the future that will all change.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Originally posted by: xtknight

Originally posted by: YOyoYOhowsDAjello
I don't care what it's doing behind the scenes. Most people here will tell you that the amount of ram on a videocard is a dumb spec to look at when picking out something. I don't understand why the same mentality applies to "pipelines" and such. Yeah, it's going to be a better indication of how the card will perform, but if you can get right to the punchline and see how it compares to other cards in FPS, then who cares what it's using?

If a card had EXTRA-crappy specs and did 1280x1024 at AA/AF, I'd assume they put image quality cheats in there. I'd be suspicious.

Second of all not one card performs the same in any given game. The gap may widen in the future too. If you had a card with a 256-bit 256MB memory, and one with 128-bit 256MB, they might perform the same now in bottlenecked games. In the future that will all change.

That's why I included "does it display what it's supposed to display" in my conditions. Yeah, if it's taking a lot of shortcuts that result in image quality loss, then of course that would be a factor.

For the second point, that's why I said to look at the games you intend to play and at the resolutions you intend to play.

I understand the 128-bit and 256-bit point, but most of these differences (including the memory bandwidth) will show up in faster results in modern games. If you're not looking at the newer games now for benchmarks, why would you care how it would play more advanced games in the future?