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Full Version: Is GDDR5 enough for Dolphin 4K
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Hello there,

I'm getting a 4K TV soon, I have a Radeon RX570 with 8 Go of GDDR5.
I know GDDR5 is not fast enough for modern demanding games at 4K but I wondered if it would be okay for Dolphin and older generation games like 2014 games.
The memory type matter but not that much . The graphic core(in you case the rx 570) is more important. And for dolphin you should be fine for 4k resolution scaling. As for game it probably will be hit or miss with that graphic card for 4k even with 2013-2014 game. Game like crysis 3 probably won't run at 4k for example. It also matter if you want a constant 60 fps with pc games.
Memory type only really matters if it is very, very, very, bad. Run away from any card you see that uses DDR memory (and yes both Nvidia and AMD are guilty of doing this on some of their cut back relatively recent graphics cards). What actually matters is memory bandwidth which you can get by using this formula
(Memory clock x Bus Width / 8) * GDDR type multiplier = Bandwidth in GB/s

I would have to look up all the multipliers, but honestly you can easily find the memory bandwidths for pretty much any card on the market online easier then doing the math yourself.

GDDR5 is perfectly reasonable in a lot games even using 4k textures (the thing that really uses up the memory bandwidth), as long as it is connected to a good size memory bus and is clocked high. Other then that.... most games I doubt it would make any difference outside of the margin of error for testing. It is nice for people who like to say their big numbers are higher then this other big number though.... (like 90% of tech today).
A 570 should be fine for Dolphin at 4k, after all Dolphin is more of a CPU workout than a GPU one! That is, until ubershaders are used. With ubershaders, hybrid should be ok, assuming there is no stuttering or other drivers issues, but it's probably not strong enough for 4k with synchronous ubershaders.
Thanks for your answers. Yes, I'm probably gonna use hybrid shaders.
I was told that HBM2 was the way to go for 4K rendering because clock speed would be bottlenecked by GDDR5 memory bandwidth anyways. After a little research, I see GDDR5 also limits the maximum bus width to number that is a bit low for comfy 4K rendering, thus according to the formula, the memory clock needs to be high to compensate.
Dolphin is unlikely to be the most graphically demanding thing on your system unless you're using synchronous ubershaders. For anything else, it's better to look at benchmark data than relying on any single spec, as that's how fast things actually are, not how good they look like they should be on paper.
IIRC a 750ti could push 4k in Dolphin in many games, probably not counting even hybrid ubers though.
(09-25-2019, 07:47 AM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]IIRC a 750ti could push 4k in Dolphin in many games, probably not counting even hybrid ubers though.

My non-ti 750 that I use with my G4560 is able to run 1080p60 without any issues, and even most games at 4k60... problem is: it doesn't support HDMI2.0 for 4k60, which is a pain in the ass for TV setups... Sad