GDDR5 vs GDDR3

[theoriginalkush]

What is your opinion?

What graphic card is faster for gameplay, 1GB GDDR5 or 2GB GDDR3?

[Dabombinable]

4 minutes ago, theoriginalkush said:

What is your opinion?

What graphic card is faster for gameplay, 1GB GDDR5 or 2GB GDDR3?

What is the graphics card in question?

[deleted_member_030719]

1 GB GDDR5 is generally used in better GPUs.

[theoriginalkush]

3 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

What is the graphics card in question?

noone, its just a question for next time when I will need new graphic card

[theoriginalkush]

4 minutes ago, Jed M said:

1 GB GDDR5 is generally used in better GPUs.

lets say I own AMD Quadcore 3GHz CPU, would you recommend me 1GB gddr5 or 2GB gddr3

[pyrojoe34]

1 minute ago, theoriginalkush said:

noone, its just a question for next time when I will need new graphic card

GDDR3 is old and not used any more (hasn't been for a while now). When you get a new GPU it will be at least GDDR5, if not GDDR5X or HBM2.

[FloRolf]

2 minutes ago, theoriginalkush said:

noone, its just a question for next time when I will need new graphic card

then ask specifically when that is actually the case.

[Kirky2k15]

Are you talking about laptop GPUs? If so always go for GDDR5 - no brainer really.

[Dabombinable]

6 minutes ago, theoriginalkush said:

lets say I own AMD Quadcore 3GHz CPU, would you recommend me 1GB gddr5 or 2GB gddr3

So a Phenom II X4 945. 1GB of GDDR5 if its paired with a stronger GPU than the GDDR3 (which is in itself very old).

[pyrojoe34]

4 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

So a Phenom II X4 945. 1GB of GDDR5 if its paired with a stronger GPU than the GDDR3 (which is in itself very old).

You can't compare things like that. It doesn't work that way. You need to compare the entire GPU to know which is faster. That's like asking if all computers with DDR4 are faster than computers with DDR3. You can't answer that question without knowing what the rest of the computer is. All you can say is that the RAM is a newer generation and likely faster bandwidth. But if the rest of the GPU with newer memory is slower then, no, it won't be faster in any practical sense.

[Sakkura]

I don't think you can buy any graphics card with GDDR3 anymore. If you see GDDR3, it's usually mislabeled and the card actually has plain DDR3. DDR3 is used in some low-end cards in Nvidia's 700 series as well as AMD's 200 and 300 series.

[mariushm]

DDR 3  transfers 2 bits of information per Hz of memory frequency. GDDR5 transfers 4 bits of information per Hz.

 

The maximum transfer speed is a combination of  memory bus width , memory type and memory frequency.  A card with (G) DDR3 memory can potentially be faster than one with GDDR5, for example if the bus width is larger or if the memory frequency is bigger.

 

For example, you could have a card with 256 bit bus, 2 GB GDDR3 running at 1200 Mhz which means maximum transfer speed from memory to gpu chip is  256 bits x 2 bits per Hz x 1.200.000.000 Hz =  614,400,000,000 bits per second or  73242 MB/s

On the other hand, you could have a card with 128 bit bus, 1 GB GDDR5 running at 1000 Mhz so the maximum transfer speed from memory to gpu is 128 bits x 4 bits per hz x 1.000.000.000 hz = 512,000,000,000 bits per second or about 61035 MB/s

 

So the card with GDDR3 even though technically is not as good as GDDR5, in this situation there is potential for data to be read and written to the memory chips much faster, so if the gpu chip (the processor) is powerful enough to use the memory speed and render video frames fast, the card with GDDR3 could be faster.. 

 

So from this point, it depends on the chip itself if it's powerful enough to use that performance boost. You could have video cards with GDDR5 and 4 GB of memoy on board but with a gpu chip that is barely powerful enough to run games at 1920x1080, using at most around 2 GB of the onboard memory.

 

However, these days, new video cards typically use gddr3 or ddr3 only on budget, low performance video cads, with 64 bit bus width, or low height video cards etc... it's just overall safer to go with a card that uses GDDR5. The price difference between GDDR3 and GDDR5 is low enough that companies don't typically cheap out on the memory type anymore, unless the gpu chip is so old that it can only work with the only memory type.

 

[typographie]

1 hour ago, theoriginalkush said:

noone, its just a question for next time when I will need new graphic card

In many cases where there are GDDR5 and DDR3 versions of the same video card, the GDDR5 version is typically faster. Such low-end cards have very little use for large amounts of VRAM, and so benefit far more from having greater memory bandwidth.

 

I'd recommend buying something better/newer. As some others mentioned above, such cards usually aren't great purchases. The fastest card I can think of that has a DDR3 version is the GT 740, and that's dangerously close to the performance of the video hardware that comes built into Intel's CPUs today.

[Dabombinable]

8 hours ago, pyrojoe34 said:

You can't compare things like that. It doesn't work that way. You need to compare the entire GPU to know which is faster. That's like asking if all computers with DDR4 are faster than computers with DDR3. You can't answer that question without knowing what the rest of the computer is. All you can say is that the RAM is a newer generation and likely faster bandwidth. But if the rest of the GPU with newer memory is slower then, no, it won't be faster in any practical sense.

Re-read. 1GB of GDDR5 if its paired with a stronger GPU. Which is far more likely as GDDR3 is very old. And I already know that it more than likely has a Phenom II X4 945.