Graphics Card Upgrade Question

[Runo]

Thinking both about PC games and Dolphin, what would be better regarding the VRam, given an specific card model: 1GB GDDR5 or 2GB DDR3?

Also, I'm thinking about a Geforce GTS 450 (my budget is not very high) this should be enough for Dolphin at 1080p shouldn't it?

GTS 450 is sold in two versions, featuring the two memory specs I said before, so I was in doubt, personally I think 1gb is enough for most things, but I felt like asking. Both have the same price the difference is some cents.

[ExtremeDude2]

First off are you sure the 1gb is DDR3? GDDR5 will be faster (in dolphin or just in theory?), but you shouldn't need 2gb.

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Perhaps you could give links?

[Runo]

Meh, sorry, I meant the other way around. Fixed now:

1GB GDDR5 or 2GB DDR3?

Now it's fixed you can see, my question is about what should give me more performance bonus, a faster memory or 1gb more of it.

[HawaiianPunch]

Faster memory. Dolphin uses very little RAM and VRAM so you'll be fine with 1GB but faster is better.

[ExtremeDude2]

(10-28-2011, 09:49 AM)Runo Wrote: Meh, sorry, I meant the other way around. Fixed now:

1GB GDDR5 or 2GB DDR3?

Now it's fixed you can see, my question is about what should give me more performance bonus, a faster memory or 1gb more of it.

Well then go for the 1gb

[NaturalViolence]

A few points I'd like to make (most of which are irrelevant info. that are just useful for a new buyer to know).

When comparing GDDR3 against GDDR5 a card with GDDR5 video memory won't always have higher memory performance. GDDR5 is beneficial because it allows higher frequencies to be achieved since it's a quad pumped standard (whereas GDDR3 is dual pumped). However frequency is only one variable to consider when trying to calculate bandwidth, the other is the bus bitwidth (or buswidth for short). To calculate the bandwidth of the memory simply take the bitwidth of the bus, divide by 8 (since there are 8 bits per byte), and then multiple by the effective bus speed (since it's quad pumped the effective bus speed, somtimes called transfer rate, is 4 times the actual clock frequency, however most vendors post the effective speed and call it "memory clock rate" instead of the real clock rate, so you usually don't have to worry about this).

For example my GTX 260 C216 lists the memory frequency as 1998 MHz. And the buswidth as 448 bits. 448 / 8 = 56 bytes per clock. 56 * 1998 = 111888 MB/s or 111.9 GB/s rounded, which is exactly what nvidia lists. Of course bandwidth doesn't always reflect actual memory performance, there are many more variables to consider still, a lesson rdram taught us all. However because of how GPU microarchitectures are structured in this case it pretty much does. A graphics card with twice the video ram bandwidth is almost guaranteed to have twice the memory performance. Some graphics cards have GDDR5 video ram but have a very narrow bus and are therefore outperformed by cards using GDDR3 memory with a much wider bus.

However in this case you're not comparing two different cards but rather the same card with two different memory standards. So whether you go with the GDDR3 or GDDR5 variants they both have a 128 bit wide memory bus. This means all you need to do to compare them is look at the memory frequency. The GDDR5 variants of the GTS 450 usually have twice the frequency of the GDDR3 variants according to the newegg specs therefore you can expect the GDDR5 variants to have twice the memory performance of the GDDR3 variants.

And then another point I was going to make has already been said:

Quote:Faster memory. Dolphin uses very little RAM and VRAM so you'll be fine with 1GB but faster is better.

What resolution do you run your PC games at? The two biggest contributors to vram usage are texture resolutions and internal resolution. As long as one of those isn't absurdly high you'll be fine with 1GB. And remember just like with main memory if a graphics engine doesn't use a full GB of vram then you won't gain any benefit from having 2GB since it simply won't use the extra vram (some people reading this may point out that this isn't 100% true since some engines scale vram usage based on how much is available, but it's still mostly true).

Right now 2GB is really only necessary for triple monitor setups (eyefinity and nvidia surround).

Quote:Also, I'm thinking about a Geforce GTS 450 (my budget is not very high) this should be enough for Dolphin at 1080p shouldn't it?

Yes. Although remember it's the internal resolution that affects GPU load not the windowed/fullscreen resolution. A GTS 450 is enough for 4x IR in most games and 3x IR in all games (SSAA is out of the question though).

Also make sure to buy from a good brand.

[Runo]

Thanks for the answers, I'll go for the 1GB GDRR5. And thanks for the information NaturalViolence, much appreciated.

And also I was going to ask when I had the chance... Back in the day when dolphin didn't have the IR adjust option, how was it done? Did it just adjust the internal res to your chosen output res?

I think I'm gonna buy from Zogis, I've come to trust them within the years and their price isn't bad, tough there's been time since I lastg bought a card I don't know how they're doing lately..

For most PC games I use 1280x1920. My monitor goes up to 1600x900 but some games just look better on that resolution or 1080p, specially if it is a console port (Duke Nukem Forever, for example).

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Back in the day when dolphin didn't have the IR adjust option, how was it done? Did it just adjust the internal res to your chosen output res?

When the scaled efb copy option was originally added it used a fractional scale (so yes it matches the fullscreen/windowed resolution). If you turned the option off then it used the native resolution (640 x 528) instead. However ram copies need to be the native resolution to work so if you set efb copy to ram the internal resolution was automatically set to 640 x 528 even if scaled efb copy was checked.

Later on integral scales were added and the original scale method was named "fractional".

Then even later on the efb copy to ram functions were rewritten with a hybrid method (uses both texture and ram copies) in order to enable higher than native internal resolutions to be used with the efb to ram option, they kept calling it efb to ram instead of renaming it to "hybrid copy" for some reason.

I and probably some other people discussed the possibility of having separate efb copy to ram (ram copy only) and hybrid (both texture and ram) options with neobrain. Neobrain eventually added this by allowing both options to be checked simultaneously for hybrid and only ram if you only want to use ram copies.

If you only check ram on the newer git revisions dolphin only emulates a ram copy so the internal resolution runs at 640 x 528 no matter what.

Quote:I think I'm gonna buy from Zogis, I've come to trust them within the years and their price isn't bad, tough there's been time since I lastg bought a card I don't know how they're doing lately..

I've never even heard of them in all my years of buying graphics cards. What country do you live in?

[HawaiianPunch]

Quote:What resolution do you run your PC games at?

Don't play them.
Also, NV, does that mean that EFB to RAM in 3.0, which are radio buttons, not checkboxes, mean that the EFB is copied to RAM and Texture? Or just RAM?

[Runo]

I'm from Brazil, I now realize Zogis is probably for Latin America only, tough they have a global site: http://zogis.com/

They're quite popular here, you can find cards from them on any decent hardware store or shopping site.

I've bought several cards from them, never had any problems