How does RAM speed affect my videocard

[RRAMJET]

Ok i realise the different DDR Ram speeds are designed for diff. motherboards and diff. cpus. There are to many to remember almost. What i don't understand is if they make a difference to general applications and mostly GAMES? Is a system with the same cpu speed but diff. fsb and ram speeds going to noticibly affect graphics card and overall performance (are these parameters important to graphics card clock speeds etc)? I ask this because when DDR ram first hit the market it was said there was hardly any noticible diff compared to sd 133 ram. Basically is it worth the extra dosh and will i notice a difference in my videocard performance?

cheers

 

[Flinx]

First, for your own reading enjoyment:
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<A HREF="http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000242" target="_new">http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000242</A>
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1) The speed of the memory and memory transfer bus (FSB) is directly linked to how fast the CPU can do calculations. The CPU has to read from and write to memory what it has no room for in its internal registers or cache. That is where fast memory helps.

2) Both the CPU and GPU have memory to do work.

3) Some games or applications are more CPU intensive, such as simulators. When the game is CPU intensive then, obviously, the faster a CPU can do its work the faster the game can play. The CPU can do its work faster if there is no memory bottle neck; that is to say, if the memory it needs to access doesn't slow it down. Larger CPU cache memory (L1,L2,L3) help by letting the computer do computations without going to the memory as often or by prefetching things the CPU needs into these caches.

4) Some games depend alot on GPU features and the software it uses (Direct X 7,8, or 9) for performance. Where the game is greatly GPU intensive the CPU/Memory becomes less important; say for instance: anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. In such a case an older system can perform well.
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Let me say that the memory on your mainboard is not directly related to your graphics card performance.
It may make a difference
a) on how fast something gets sent to your GPU for processing (if there is a CPU/memory bottleneck)
... and
b) AGP aperture is also used to store textures should there be spill over from the Graphics Card memory
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Flinx on 08/06/03 11:27 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[pIII_Man]

when pc2100 first came out...many people were using it on the via apollo chipset for pIII's...i beleive it was the kt266a? Anyhow...for pIII's ddr means absolutly nothing...because they use an sdram bus with a max transfer of 1064mb/s (@ 133mhz fsb)...so what is pc2100 with a 2100+ mb/s transfer rate going to do to help...

Now ddr ram helps because we have chipsets that effectivly implement it and cpus that can efficiently use it...ie the p4 which is a very bandwith hungry cpu...

If i put my k6 in a Ferrari it would be faster than your your pentium 4 or Athlon XP :tongue: