[blubla]

Hello folks,

I dont understand about 512mb ddr2 and 256mb ddr3, which one is better? one has more memory than the other but the other is ddr3.

Appreacite your help

[Hybr!d]

One is faster than the other, to be honest speed isn't a major advantage with RAM.

How much you have in MB is.

[blubla]

So 512mb ddr2 is better than 256mb ddr3, if we talk about video card is it the same? 512mb ddr2 and 256mb gddr3

[spot]

The 2 and 3 mean how much data they can shift in a normal clock tick, two times or three times.

The memory size lets you generate more frames in advance and select more colour depth.

If you're out to get as near as you can manage to 60 frames a second - that's a gamer's ultimate nirvana - I'd personally drop my colour depth and use ddr3 and get closer to it.

The proper answer is 512MB of DDR3, of course.

[Carbon]

Your comparison is a little silly as spot seems to have alluded to - 256MB vs 512MB in any situation where you'd even consider DDR3 is going to be useless, because anyone adopting DDR3 now is going to be a gamer.

If we go, say, 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 vs 1GB of DDR3..the question becomes much more meaningful. At this point, DDR3 will provide a better experience in general.

[alex]

Are we talking about system ram or a gpu's ram Blubla?

If you're talking about a graphic card's ram then it's primarily dependent on the core spec of the gpu itself and it's set speed in mhz.

[blubla]

First of all, Iam sorry about asking this kind of question, because my experience about pc is kinda poor.

Now just to confirm...

So in graphic card, DDR3 is better and RAM the more MB is better.

If that is thanks so much for all the answer

[spot]

If you're planning on buying something we'd be happy to talk about what's best value for your budget. Or if you have a few models in mind we can say what we think of them.

[blubla]

I have posted this in another link but anyway, Iam planning to buy this piece, is it good or bad?

I will like read some explanation of you guys about the specs of this product, so I can learn a bit of it.

Well, of course , not comparing it to the top cards

Here is the the product:

http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?f...0&cat2_no=136#

[alex]

The first (and most important thing) to be looking for when choosing a graphics card is what card you need (and how much you need to spend) to play games at the native resolution of your monitor be it 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050 or, without getting silly, 1920x1200. The more pixels a monitor has the harder a card has to work.

But you also need the card to produce good frame rates. Regarding this the minimum frame rate is the most important. I personally consider 25 fps (frames per second) to be the absolute minimum a card should produce playing a particular game because anything lower and your eyes will recognise stuttering (for want of a better word). This detracts from the gaming experience.

You also need to take into account that games should be played at max detail settings because this is how the writer's of games have produced the game to look. The majority of games currently available can look a tad bland with detail settings turned down. They only incorporate detail 'sliders' within the game menu's to allow less powerful cards to run the game therefore widening the market for game's players.

Again, personally, I also consider a that a card should be able to play a game at a minimum of 2xAA (Anti Aliasing) and 4x AF (Anisotropic filtering). Anti-aliasing is there to get rid of jagged edges but it can also help with rendering a clearer image in the distance in a particular scene of a game. Anisotropic filtering enhances image quality on textures and also gets rid of blur at off-centre viewing angles.

Nowadays most of the work when gaming is done by the gpu on the card but the cpu still has to deal with some aspects like A.I (artificial Intelligence) in games. Lets say you play command and conquer. The card will take care of the textures of the land, the units and buildings etc but the cpu will work out how to move the tank you've just selected to move from point A on the game map to point B.

That's just one example, but I've used A.I to make the point that it's still very important to ensure you get a balance between the cpu and gpu AND of course the monitor's native resolution.

Regarding slot-types. AGP preceded PCI-E, technically PCI-E can produce a higher bandwidth (hence 8x/16x) than AGP but I've yet to see card make full use of this.

But as PCI-E is now the industry's standard I'll mention this type of card only.

When choosing a DX9 card (windows XP) you need to be looking at the following things:

ROP'S (Render Output Unit) - These output the produced pixels to the screen.
Pixel pipes - These produce pixel's and textures to be sent to the rop's.
Vertex pipes - These add special effects (such as explosions) to objects being produced for the screen.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) speed - Bit of an obvious one really, the faster it is the faster it can calculate operations.
Memory controller bit width - You'll see these as quoted as 64bit, 128bit and so on. The wider the better as this basically moves the finished product from the pixel pipes, vertex pipes etc through the ram and onto the screen. The wider a bit width is the more it can move at any given time.
Ram - Depending on how powerful a card is using the headings above dictates how much ram you need. Also, if you want to play a game with AA the ram amount comes into it. This is one of my focuses regarding cards. If you've read some of my previous posts you'll see that 256mb of ram is the absolute max you'll need on a card when gaming at today's standard resolution of 1280x1024 (1440x900 if using a widescreen monitor). At 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 you'll need 512mb. BUT if a card that is low end in the gpu, rop, vertex stakes has 512mb of ram then it makes no sense as the card will not be able to produce enough pixels etc to be able to game at the higher resolutions in the first place, so fitting enough ram to do that makes no sense whatsover except as a selling point as inexperience people will see the higher number and assume its a better card.
Ram speed - When looking at a card you'll see this quoted at an effective speed. This isn't marketing. Because ram on a card is controlled in parallel (say 2 banks of 128mb each) you'll have each bank running at say 700mhz but running together as they do they have an effective speed of 1400mhz or 1.4ghz.

For a DX10 (Windows Vista) card you need to be looking at:

All of the above except for the pixel pipes and Vertex pipes.

Architectural changes to cards now have mean that Stream Shaders on a card of this type do the same job that both pixel pipes and vertex pipes did.

This has one advantage in that wheras before (on a DX9 card) when the gpu is rendering some complex geometry (processed by vertex pipes) the pixel pipes sat idle. This meant that the game frame rates may slow down because there has always been a disparagy between the amount of both pixel and vertex pipes on a particular card, there's usually more pixel pipes. So for any shader intensive rendering your card might be running the game fine and then all of a sudden the frame rates could drop right down.

But with the new DX10 cards, there is no disparagy and theres never any part of the card sat idle.

Regarding ram amount on a DX10 card, again, the max you need at 1280x1024 is 320mb, at 1680x1050 its 512mb (ATI/Nvidia) or 640mb (NVidia), at 1920x1200 it's 1GB (ATI) or 768mb (Nvidia). But I don't think even 1gb of ram will save the (now defunct) ATI 2900XT at that resolution.

Tips:

1) There is a plethora of factory overclocked cards out there, but be advised (especially with DX9 card) these overclocks only make about a 5-10 frame difference per second to the stock speed cards. BUT (there's always a but isn't there) if this frame rate takes you over the 25fps i mentioned earlier then it's worth the difference in price.

2) Let me re-iterate again, there is absolutely no point getting a low to midrange card with bags (512mb) of ram. None. It's a selling point. A con.

3) Check the power requirements needed from your psu for a particular card. A lot of cards can be run directly from the pci-e port (more so now with the reduction in switch sizes for gpu's and the introduction of PCI-E 2) but the majority do need a 6-pin plug directly from your psu so ensure that A) you have this plug (usually black) and b) your psu can produce enough voltage and amps on this dedicated 12v line.

Now, regarding the card in your link. The high mhz rating of the stream shaders will require fast ram, hence DDR3, but the number of stream shaders it has won't require (or be able to make use of) more ram than 256mb.

This card, due to it's number of shaders and amount of ram won't be able to game above 1280x1024 and even then, on newer titles, it's going to struggle.

Have you had a look at the AMD 3850 256mb? Similar in price but a stronger performer than the card you quote.