Please explain these cards to me :)

[Cptnstevez]

Hi so if someone could explain to me what these are I would greatly appreciate it:

-different types of bus and what it is/does

-cuda cores/stream processors 

-gddr5 vs ddr3 

-clock speed 

 

just trying to further my understand of GPUs at the moment any help would be great would save me reading over lots of the same info again 

(attached some images as references/examples of it helps) 

thanks 

 

 

Thanks ??

[YedZed]

In brief: 

Bus: what transfers data on the card, larger numbers better.

Cuda/Stream Cores/Processors: Kinda like CPU cores, except on a GFX card. They allow it to do lots of parralel tasks. Bigger numbers better.

DDR(3) is CPU RAM. GDDR(5) is GPU RAM. Bigger is better, for textures.

Clock speed: How fast GPU (or memory) runs. Bigger is better.

 

Google is your friend, btw. 

[Squish4058]

Bus is basically a highway, so a wider bus can send more information per pulse
So a 192 bit bus can send 192 bits over a single cycle, how fast the cycles are on the bus is another thing

 

Clock speed is basically the amount of cycles on the "brain" part of the card that occur per second, with it only being able to calculate 1 thing per cycle.
So if you had two identical cards, a higher clockspeed can calculate more per second.

DDR3 is motherboard ram Gddr5 is graphics card ram (people call it Vram), its basically storage for anything.
So if you load a game, all the pictures for everything you could look at within say 500m are loaded into vram
When you load microsoft office, all the pictures, word art, and fonts are loaded into your motherboard ram

[Godlygamer23]

10 minutes ago, Cptnstevez said:

Hi so if someone could explain to me what these are I would greatly appreciate it:

-different types of bus and what it is/does

-cuda cores/stream processors 

-gddr5 vs ddr3 

-clock speed 

CUDA cores/stream processors do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to processing data. These include rendering applications, Folding@home, and PhysX processing(NVIDIA). 

 

GDDR5 is significantly faster than DDR3 when it comes to raw bandwidth, but one might ask why we use DDR3 with CPUs rather than GDDR5 if it's so much faster. The reason is that while GDDR5 has more raw bandwidth, it has much higher latency, and CPUs need to have very low latency because they don't need huge amounts of bandwidth usually. This can change though if the CPU is handling a lot of data at once, for example during rendering, where a higher clock speed is favored over lower latency(though achieving both is more ideal) because the CPU needs more raw bandwidth.

 

Clock speed is subjective to the architecture. If you compare a 3570K to an FX 4300 at the same frequency, you'll see exactly what I mean. The 3570K will crush the CPU completely because while the clock speeds and thread counts are the same, the 3570K has a significantly higher IPC than the 4300. A clock speed is how many cycles or operations are completed per second. 

 

Buses simply allow data to be transferred. They're essentially wires embedded in the board that allow for the memory controllers in the GPU to be connected to the memory chips for example.

Edited September 15, 2016 by Godlygamer23

[Energycore]

 

[Godlygamer23]

5 minutes ago, YedZed said:

In brief: 

Bus: what transfers data on the card, larger numbers better.

Cuda/Stream Cores/Processors: Kinda like CPU cores, except on a GFX card. They allow it to do lots of parralel tasks. Bigger numbers better.

DDR(3) is CPU RAM. GDDR(5) is GPU RAM. Bigger is better, for textures.

Clock speed: How fast GPU (or memory) runs. Bigger is better.

 

Google is your friend, btw. 

I wouldn't define DDR3 as "CPU RAM." It's just a memory type that's usually used with CPUs. And the same goes with GDDR5, just the opposite. CPUs can most definitely use GDDR5 as RAM as shown in the PS4, and DDR3 can be used as vRAM as shown in the Xbox One. 

 

And the amount of stream processors isn't necessarily better if the architecture is junk.

Edited September 15, 2016 by Godlygamer23

[Cptnstevez]

Thanks everyone !

[YedZed]

Just now, Godlygamer23 said:

I wouldn't define DDR3 as "CPU RAM." It's just a memory type that's usually used with CPUs. And the same goes with GDDR5, just the opposite. CPUs can most definitely use GDDR5 as RAM as shown in the PS4, and DDR3 can be used as vRAM as shown in the Xbox One. 

Really? I did not know those examples. That's very interesting. Thank you.

[Cptnstevez]

That was actually one of the things I was trying to understand it for because I had seem them using apks one with gddr5 and the other with ddr3

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, YedZed said:

Really? I did not know those examples. That's very interesting. Thank you.

For your learning pleasure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_technical_specifications#System_memory_.28RAM.29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Hardware

[Cptnstevez]

23 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

For your learning pleasure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_technical_specifications#System_memory_.28RAM.29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Hardware

Thanks