How to read a graphics card by its specs

Hi, there are a few main things you must consider when buying a graphics card. THey are listed below in order of importance.

1) Clock Speed-The higher the clock speed, the better. A higher clock speed makes games smoother and it can complete more taks with ease.
2) VRAM(Video RAM)-The more RAM the graphics card has, the better. More RAM makes it easy to run a multi monitor setup and can load graphics faster in games.

Hope you find a good GPU. (If you say what your budget is, i could suggest a few)

HI, glad to help.
What do you mean by more in-depth?

this is an explanation i found a long time ago and copied cause i liked how easy it is to understand.


"In layman terms, CUDA Cores and Stream processors are exactly the same. The question is similar to asking whether Intel and AMD CPUs are the same or not. The difference in names is mostly commercial branding.

Both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD cards are multi-core units excelling in executing parallel programs.

The difference is that AMD stream processors are smaller, simpler, and run on lower frequency. NVIDIA CUDA cores are bigger, more complex and run on a higher frequency. That's why one cannot judge by the number of processors.

Both cards use different architectures, where CUDA are more general-purpose. This difference also shows in the way programs are compiled to run on these cards. The CUDA compiler does less optimization, letting the card assign the cores as needed at runtime, while the AMD compiler optimizes much more as regarding core assignments.

Another difference is developer support, where NVIDIA does a much bigger effort to woo developers to their cards. This is why there many more libraries, code snippets and developer resources in general available for NVIDIA.

The effect of this difference in architecture depends on the task to do, and whether a greater number of processors, although slower ones, improves the performance or not. For example, AMD cards are much better for Bitcoin mining. For graphics, the comparison usually comes up as as a close match for similarly-priced cards."

OH and i looked up your GPU, its pretty sweet.

when comparing nvidia to nvidia you can say more cuda cores are better. when comparing amd to amd you can say more streams are better. but amd to nvidia is harder to compare but as the quote ends with, similar prices give similar performance. so $150 worth of amd is pretty close to $150 of nvidia despite the different numbers of thei brand specific cores.

an analogy to it would be something like this: if i have 1 guy that can paint a house in 1 day and another company has a guy that takes 2 days to do it who do you go with? the 1 day job obviously. (the faster single cuda core vs slower single streamer core) but what if the other company has 1500 of the guys that can do it in 2 days and i only have 500 guys who can each do it in 1 day. who gets it done first now if they all show up at once? gets a lot more complicated now as there's more to keep organized and coordinated and such. now we're getting into the job taking 1 hours vs 1.01 hours or some insignificant difference. can you really say my company is better or worse than the other one?

the "which one do i go with?" question is only specific to certain games. there are some games that are a lot better with nvidia cards and some that are better on amd cards. you have to look into a specific game and see the benchmarks if your looking for one specific game to play. if you play lots of games, look into a number of them and see if one brand is constantly better for those games. such as you play 10 games all the time and 7 of them seem to work better on nvidia so an nvidia card makes sense for your use.

other than that scenario, there is little difference in cards at the same price point. what i do when building is pick the gpu last and get the best i can for the cash i have. with sales and rebates and such, often i get more than normal for the money if i'm careful but i don't worry about amd vs nvidia, i simply get the most for the money i have. if the buyer has a preference then i will of course accommodate but that's it.

i have never seen any compelling reason to say something like "i always go with nvidia because amd is missing _____" or "amd is the way to go because they do _______ so much better"