How
to choose a graphics card.
One misnomer that people don’t
realize is that excessive memory can actually slow performance.
This problem has become more prevalent as the prices of large
amounts of memory have significantly dropped.
When choosing a graphics card it
is important to know what the limiting factors are that are
preventing better graphic performance. By eliminating the
bottlenecks, performance can be greatly increased.
Hardware
The number one limiting factor
inhibiting increased graphic performance is the systems CPU
speed.
Buy the fastest CPU that you can
afford (also make sure your motherboard chipset is current).
More is not always better. More
memory does not increase performance, especially if the software
has not been optimized to take advantage of the extra memory.
One misnomer that people don’t realize is that excessive
memory can actually slow performance. This is because the CPU
must check each memory address with each cycle of the CPU. This
checking of the memory is done regardless if the memory address
has data or not. You can needlessly be slowing your CPU because
it keeps checking empty memory addresses. What you want is not
more memory but faster memory. This will make a much greater
difference than just more, especially with 3-D games. This rule
not only applies to the CPU but to the GPU as well. Check the
speed of the memory on the graphics card and buy the VGA card
with the fastest video memory that you can.
For system memory, buy not only
the highest frequency memory but purchase the memory that is
labeled CL2.0. The CL2.0 is the latency (pause time to discharge
data) and will give increased performance over CL2.5. (In most
cases DDR333 CL2.0 can outperform DDR400 CL2.5) This increase in
graphic performance will not significantly increase average
frame per second rates but it will substantially increase
minimum frame rates. This is done by relieving the memory speed
bottleneck.
* For smooth video you need to be
worried about minimum frames per second not average frames per
second. You can’t really see a difference between 60fps and
120fps. It is when the minimum frame rate drops too low (below
about 24fps) that you see unsmooth video and this is what you
want to eliminate.
