Tom's Hardware > Forum > Graphic & Displays > Graphics Cards > Quick question
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piig_joey   11-21-2006 at 04:38:51 AM

Hey, guys. New to this forum and site. Realized if I need any hardware help this is the place to be. Anyways, I'm planning on purchasing a new graphic card for my pc. I know what most of the specs mean except for the "memory bandwidth". What's that and how does it differ from gpus with lower memory bandwidth?

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kaotao   11-21-2006 at 05:16:05 AM
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The quickest answer: for current DX9 cards, 256bit is the way to go. Avoid 128bit interfaces. One exception would be the 7600GT. Higher clock and memory speeds, and architecture make up for the 128mb interface.

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mdalli   11-21-2006 at 05:30:46 AM
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Technically, memory bandwidth refers to the size of the "chunk" of data that can be written to or read from the memory per clock cycle.

So, the higher the better, all things being equal.

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piig_joey   11-23-2006 at 04:27:12 AM
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Thanks for the replies. Sorry, just a bit confused, mdalli you stated that "memory bandwidth refers to the size of the "chunk" of data that can be written to or read from the memory per clock cycle." By memory you mean the main system memory i.e RAM? Or the memory on the graphic card?

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raven_87   11-23-2006 at 04:51:16 AM
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I believe he was refering to the mem on the gpu.

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mdalli   11-28-2006 at 06:38:54 PM
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Quote :

Thanks for the replies. Sorry, just a bit confused, mdalli you stated that "memory bandwidth refers to the size of the "chunk" of data that can be written to or read from the memory per clock cycle." By memory you mean the main system memory i.e RAM? Or the memory on the graphic card?



If you have a dedicated graphics card (and if you care about things like "memory bandwidth", you should), it refers to how fast the GPU accesses the dedicated graphics memory on the graphics card. Don't worry, especially with PCIe x16, the roadblock is not between the graphics card and the system memory bus.

However, motherboard-integrated graphics solutions almost always share system memory.

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