Budget Graphics Strike Back: Revenge of the RAM
by Derek Wilson on May 19, 2005 5:40 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
From these numbers, our recommendation for the budget market still stands with NVIDIA's 32MB TurboCache card. The card's performance fluctuates a moderate amount with system RAM speeds and is the performance leader under both fast and slow memory.In a very interesting scaling test, the NVIDIA cards seemed to come out on top in this round. It appears that ATI's 32MB HyperMemory card is just more sensitive to RAM speeds when all other variables are equal. Because TurboCache seems to rely more heavily on system memory, we had thought to see it suffer more with less bandwidth and higher latency.
In another twist, the 64 MB card really doesn't seem to have any advantage under the games that we tested. Its larger bank of slower local memory doesn't seem to help it stay competitive when paired with slower system memory. This also goes against what we had first assumed would happen.
These cards do benefit from faster memory, and with cheap DDR400 available, there is really no reason to build a system with PC2700 RAM. Of course, if buying from a vendor who bundles 333MHz data rate memory with their system, rest assured that performance won't completely bottom out when it comes to the budget gaming experience.
And it just goes to show, there is no substitute for running the numbers for a given configuration. We can't test them all, but we won't go down without a fight.
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kobymu - Saturday, May 21, 2005 - link
I was hoping for some information about how these card suffer/gain in performance when move from the AMD platform to INTEL's, considering the differences in memory subsystem.1.Assuming that the graphic card will deploy some sort of DMA, in an Intel platform, it should have a shorter path (only needs to go through the northbridge) as opposed Amd (pci-e controller/chipset -> integrated memory controller on Amd cpu).
2.DDR2?
AtaStrumf - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
Yea I know, my spelling sucks. But hey, nobody is perfect :-)Rand - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
xsilver - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
sintax = syntaxsorry... I usually dont correct people on spelling but it was funny cause you were talking about language and spelt something wrong :P
AtaStrumf - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
OK, I guess technically, in this particular case you're right, that the order can be reverse of what is logical and still get the right message across, I just think it's more than a little bit confusing.English language in general, not unlike programming language, is however extremely depedent on the order of words (sintax), because it's grammar is very simple, missing many, shall we say "features", of other languages like declension for example, that's why I think it's important to keep it right.
If you're interested you can read up on my language here:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/S/Sl...
Our grammar's complexity has to be second only to that of chinese'/arabic scribble, so most of us over her are inherently grammar experts :-)
OK, I'll stop bugging you now ;-)
JarredWalton - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
Now we just need to get Derek to run some tests with 2.5-3-3 RAM and a realistic CPU choise like a Celeron of Athlon 64 3000+. ;)DerekWilson - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
As I said -- I cannot say decrease, as the percentage was calculated as an increase. Sorry I forgot to mention that I'm not going to recaculate my data and reenter it into the graphing engine in order to call it a decrease when all I need to do is change a couple words :-)Besides, all of the percentage data in our processor and graphics articles is a percent increase. Why break tradition now :-)
Lexically, I could have swapped 2:2:2:8 and 3:4:4:12. Of course, as per English, it makes the same ammount of sense to do what I did. Technically, I don't believe there are any restrictions on the order of prepositional phrases. I will admit that saying "increase to fast from slow" could be tough to skim, but hopefully no one will think games run faster with crappier products.
AtaStrumf - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
He, he this is just hilarious Derek. I give you two perfectly fine options and you go and find a third, totally confusing one. "increase to 2228 from 34412" :stares in amazement: OK maybe my English isn't quite up to par with you guys, or maybe I have been reading a few too many biochemistry books, while not sleeping enough, but this just doesn't make any sense to me. I would recalculate for decrease and say "...decrease from 2228 to 34412", but that's just me.ReadyFireAim - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
The 128MB onboard memory version on the X300 (256MB supported) is available @ Newegg for a mere $2 more than the 32MB onboard TurboCache that's recommended here."The 128MB onboard X300 HyperMemory part should perform significantly better than what we are seeing here"
Is it fair to assume that the 128MB X300 will be the beat these others; the $2 cost difference doesn't matter to me at this point.
DerekWilson - Thursday, May 19, 2005 - link
I'm sorry about the graphs there -- I've changed them to say increase to 2228 from 34412.Actually, it would have been improper to change increase to decrease, as the percentages would be smaller for percent decrease. (increase from 15 to 20 is 33%, but decrease from 20 to 15 is 25%).
#5/11:
Integrated graphics performance generally isn't as high as even these budget cards.
Also, 754 boards would be inappropriate for this test -- these cards are all PCI Express cards.
We did use the same system from our previous test -- the Athlon 64 FX-53 nForce 4.