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[steel jackal]

im building my first gaming rig and a guy that i know recommended that i use the ASUS radeon 480 graphics card since im planning on using an ASUS motherboard, and when you use both you can mess with your overclocking settings without rebooting, as well as the fact that it has 8gb of ram as opposed to 6gb.

One thing that i noticed about that GPU is that its memory speed is only 1330 MHz, as opposed to the MSI GTX 1080 that has a memory speed of 8100 MHz.

Thats a significant difference, so what kind of impact does the memory speed of a GPU have on performance? Does a lower memory speed mean lower FPS? slower loading times?

I'm interested in both gaming and rendering so information regarding both would be useful.

[Max™]

That's the actual processor speed on the 480, I assume it has GDDR5 and a similar ram clock, and the 1060 (which is the one with the GDDR5 speed of 8100 MHz) has a processor clock of 1.5 ~1.8 GHz so it's a bit faster on the crunching side as far as that goes, but the architecture and pipelines and hoojiggers and whatsitmabobs are all buzzworded to hell and back.

[wierd]

I would be predisposed to say that the GPU speed is a significant factor WHEN you are using the GPU for compute operations. Such as say, the GPU enhanced version of Folding@Home, Bitcoin mining, and pals.

Unless your fancy AAA title does a whole lot of physics sim on the GPU, and other GPU offset computations for the game engine, the speed of the GPU's memory is going to take back-seat to the RAM size.

[Noyemi K]

Generally this would affect something like texel fill rate (e.g. - the faster the memory clock, the more quickly texture pages can be swapped in and out of GPU RAM). GPU RAM size itself is probably more important for gaming, especially if you're not doing GPU compute stuff—though bear in mind that unused RAM is essentially not even in play and doesn't affect speed itself.

[steel jackal]

I would be predisposed to say that the GPU speed is a significant factor WHEN you are using the GPU for compute operations. Such as say, the GPU enhanced version of Folding@Home, Bitcoin mining, and pals.

Unless your fancy AAA title does a whole lot of physics sim on the GPU, and other GPU offset computations for the game engine, the speed of the GPU's memory is going to take back-seat to the RAM size.

the only game that i have that has a lot of physics simulation is KSP and that runs fine on ye olde laptop, so go for the extra RAM?
i dont really have any super high end games, most of the games im interested in recommend the gtx 550 at the most, im just going with a new card because that way the card will die before standards rise so high that its too weak to play the games of the future.

also i use blender so a better card means that it wont take 2 days to render a photorealistic video thats 5 seconds long (based on how it took my current comp 2 days to render a mediocre quality video that lasted 5 seconds)

[LoSboccacc]

also depends on monitor resolution, you have to push all that stuff trough the same port in the end and the time is extremely limited, especially at 60 fps.

[steel jackal]

also depends on monitor resolution, you have to push all that stuff trough the same port in the end and the time is extremely limited, especially at 60 fps.

1920x1080, im using a tv, though i will probably get an actual monitor once i build my comp since i can see the individual pixels since the tv is right in front of me.

yeah my tv is too small to be used as a tv and too big to be used as a monitor, it was originally in a different room where it was just the right size.

though i have been considering getting multiple monitors so i can do 5760x1080 so that way i could say turn the FOV up on games and be able to see a lot more without things looking weird, or to have dwarf therapist and a fortress visualizer open at the same time as DF and not have to be switching between them (i would absolutely love that) or so i can watch youtube without ads and play games at the same time.

many possibilities with 3 monitors

[jaked122]

though i have been considering getting multiple monitors so i can do 5760x1080 so that way i could say turn the FOV up on games and be able to see a lot more without things looking weird, or to have dwarf therapist and a fortress visualizer open at the same time as DF and not have to be switching between them (i would absolutely love that) or so i can watch youtube without ads and play games at the same time.

Most games with FOV won't work very well at that aspect ratio.


If you want that, they perhaps you might want to look at one of those curved monitors that's popped up recently. They're a bit more expensive, but they might do better than multiple monitors for games like that.


Multi-monitor is great for Dwarf Fortress.

[steel jackal]

though i have been considering getting multiple monitors so i can do 5760x1080 so that way i could say turn the FOV up on games and be able to see a lot more without things looking weird, or to have dwarf therapist and a fortress visualizer open at the same time as DF and not have to be switching between them (i would absolutely love that) or so i can watch youtube without ads and play games at the same time.

Most games with FOV won't work very well at that aspect ratio.


If you want that, they perhaps you might want to look at one of those curved monitors that's popped up recently. They're a bit more expensive, but they might do better than multiple monitors for games like that.


Multi-monitor is great for Dwarf Fortress.

hm, how well does having multiple monitors of diffrent resolutions work?
if a curved monitor is within my budget i might get one of them and a small one for aforementioned youtube watching and DF utilities

the reason i thought that having 3 monitors and high FOV would work is because ive seen pictures of people with setups like that. ill have to look around to see how they actually do that because its seems like something i would like

[Max™]

On linux it can be a pain to get multi-monitor setups with different screen sizes to work right with vsync, but most of that is down to the compositors you're working with I think, I switched to disabling the KDE one and using Compton directly and it fixed the tearing with a GT 730 and 1366x768+1920x1080 setup.

[steel jackal]

On linux it can be a pain to get multi-monitor setups with different screen sizes to work right with vsync, but most of that is down to the compositors you're working with I think, I switched to disabling the KDE one and using Compton directly and it fixed the tearing with a GT 730 and 1366x768+1920x1080 setup.

im not very good with linux due to only using it for minecraft and df (they happen to run faster on it for some reason even though most of my games run slower on it) so i would like to avoid having to mess with anything too advanced.

when i go looking for monitors i will try and find a smaller, but still 1920x1080 monitor.
plus ive had issues with windows and diffrent resolution monitors too, so just avoiding diffrent resolutions would be better

[Grimlocke]

When comparing graphics memory across more than one type of GPU, throughput will be the metric to use. Meaning the amount of data that can be moved from and to memory in a set amount of time. You can get it by multiplying memory frequency with the memory bus width, though its usually just listed somewhere in the specifications.

Though even comparing memory throughput alone on different GPUs is only useful for speculative rambling at most. Just look up benchmarks done with the cards that roughly match what your going to do with it.

The 480 and 1080 are also in a pretty different price class, despite both ending with '80'.

For the games you mentioned, DF, Minecraft and KSP I would recommend investing a bit more into the processor than the graphics card. All of these will generally bottleneck around CPU performance, even KSP which actually runs its physics on a single CPU thread (unless they changed that, it would be nice if they had...)

Within the AMD 480's price range is the 1060, which you pick kind of depends on if you want either of their specific features (freesync vs gsync kind of things), or else whichever one happens to be on offer somewhere. Their price/performance ratios don't really different significantly. Personally I have a slight preference for AMD due to some shady business practices on Nvidia's part.