I thought clock speed was more important than VRAM?

[LeechHax]

Yesterday I posted a topic on this forum asking if a GeForce GTX 950 would be bottlenecked on my pc.

Then someone said I should get a Radeon R9 380x instead, because they're better... However, the Radeon has more VRAM but less clock speed. And I thought clock speed usually mattered the most.

 

Basically, I want to play Far Cry 4 on my pc when I get a graphics card (whichever one I decide  to get). So which would be better?

 

Radeon R9 380: 4 GB GDDR5, 918 MHz

GeForce GTX 950: 2 GB GDDR5, 1.17 Ghz

[Aytex]

r9 380 hands down

[App4that]

 

 

[flibberdipper]

Not even remotely true. It's like saying the 9590 is faster than a 4790 because it's clocked higher. In that example, the 9590 is running on a 4-ish year old architecture that can't TOUCH modern stuff.

 

Regardless, the 380 is the better bet because it's more "965" (trading blows with a 960 in a lot of cases, but then dusting it in others) range, at least as I remember. Might even be faster or a smidge slower.

[Glenwing]

8 minutes ago, LeechHax said:

Yesterday I posted a topic on this forum asking if a GeForce GTX 950 would be bottlenecked on my pc.

Then someone said I should get a Radeon R9 380x instead, because they're better... However, the Radeon has more VRAM but less clock speed. And I thought clock speed usually mattered the most.

 

Basically, I want to play Far Cry 4 on my pc when I get a graphics card (whichever one I decide  to get). So which would be better?

 

Radeon R9 380: 4 GB GDDR5, 918 MHz

GeForce GTX 950: 2 GB GDDR5, 1.17 Ghz

Frequency can only tell you the performance relative to the same family GPU. Different GPU designs (such as AMD vs NVIDIA designs, which are both very different), accomplish different amounts of computation per MHz. So the frequency (MHz) is meaningless in comparison to different GPUs, you cannot tell which one is more powerful by looking at the frequency, it only tells you something when you are comparing two GPUs with the same design.

[LeechHax]

1 hour ago, Glenwing said:

Frequency can only tell you the performance relative to the same family GPU. Different GPU designs (such as AMD vs NVIDIA designs, which are both very different), accomplish different amounts of computation per MHz. So the frequency (MHz) is meaningless in comparison to different GPUs, you cannot tell which one is more powerful by looking at the frequency, it only tells you something when you are comparing two GPUs with the same design.

Oh okay! So because GPU's are all different, I can't tell how powerful it is just by looking at the Ghz? That makes sense... But does architecture matter? Like, is there a brand of GPU that has a better architecture than the rest?

[xiej]

51 minutes ago, LeechHax said:

Oh okay! So because GPU's are all different, I can't tell how powerful it is just by looking at the Ghz? That makes sense... But does architecture matter? Like, is there a brand of GPU that has a better architecture than the rest?

If you thought architecture for CPU's was important, then GPU architectures are magnitudes more important.

Newer architechtures for GPUs are better.

For NVidia, its Maxwell 2.0 (9xx cards) and for AMD, its GCN 3.0(I'm pretty sure)(3xx series).

Technically, Maxwell 2.0 is more advanced, but AMD used its GCN 3.0 architecture form the 2xx card series and piled on more transistors, and sells the cards at the same price point as NVidia for close performance. NVidia has better drivers, and AMD has better compute performance, but the performance is based on the price point mostly.

While choosing GPU's, look at how each GPU in you price range performs in which games you want to play, and buy the one that gives you the most FPS for your money.

Also consider other things, such as G-Sync, Freesync, NVidia has Shadowplay and AMD has something that I cannot remember competing with Shadowplay, NVidia has CUDA(But I don't think it matters to you)

[techguru]

1 hour ago, LeechHax said:

Oh okay! So because GPU's are all different, I can't tell how powerful it is just by looking at the Ghz? That makes sense... But does architecture matter? Like, is there a brand of GPU that has a better architecture than the rest?

when looking at pc hardware....to know what is faster...LOOK AT BENCHMARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

is that really a hard thing to understand?

[Glenwing]

37 minutes ago, LeechHax said:

Oh okay! So because GPU's are all different, I can't tell how powerful it is just by looking at the Ghz? That makes sense... But does architecture matter? Like, is there a brand of GPU that has a better architecture than the rest?

Well yes, architecture determines the power of each core, but whether one architecture is better than another can't be evaluated on the basis of specifications. It doesn't matter if one architecture needs more cores or more GHz to get the same performance as another. If GPUs using that architecture do have more cores and more GHz, for the same cost and power, then it's just a different design approach and if it works just as well, there's nothing worse about it. For evaluating architectures, the only thing that matters is comparing what goes in (power consumption and cost (or more directly, die size, which more or less determines the manufacturing cost of the GPU)) and what comes out (performance). Exactly how the GPU is doing what it does, how all the parts are organized internally, is irrelevant.

 

You can, if you want, analyze each architecture and see how they compare relative to each other; how many AMD cores at 1.0GHz it takes to match NVIDIA's cores at the same frequency, and say NVIDIA's cores are worth 1.5 AMD cores in performance or whatever, and go from there, but it's much simpler to just look at performance benchmarks in real games and such. At the end of the day if one GPU does actual stuff faster than another GPU, it doesn't matter which one has what numbers on the spec sheet.

[Glenwing]

2 minutes ago, techguru said:

when looking at pc hardware....to know what is faster...LOOK AT BENCHMARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

is that really a hard thing to understand?

For people who are new to this stuff, yes it is not as obvious as you think. There is no need for the condescending tone and I'd suggest you drop it from here on out.

[techguru]

1 minute ago, Glenwing said:

For people who are new to this stuff, yes it is not as obvious as you think. There is no need for the condescending tone and I'd suggest you drop it from here on out.

its more laziness then anything