Pop quiz!

[kingandy]

What's more important in a graphics card, memory size or clock speed?

EDITED TO ADD: General consensus seems to confirm what we all suspected, size is more important than speed. I will therefore place an order for card A (henceforth to be known as the Patrick Junior).

Comments

[arwel.livejournal.com]

I'm no expert on graphics cards, but I believe the more memory you have the better it will perform at higher resolutions due to not needing to shunt quite so much data around. If you have plenty of memory to cope with your res then clock speed is king. Or something. If you're feeling a bit advanced you can overclock your graphics card without too much fuss, though with that passively cooled one it wouldn't be an option.

I just searched for as many reviews and lab tests as I could before choosing my card.

[kingandy]

Yeah, I've had a quick skim for reviews but most of the places I've looked just give a general comparison of chipset and model (eg 'Nvidia 8600GT'), and occasionally brand, without going into the details of specific variants.

Annoyingly these are almost exactly the same price and both are in Dabs' "hot deals" box for that category ... though the higher/slower one appears to be marginally more popular.

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Also the one with more memory is a duel DVI, FTW.

[kingandy]

They both appear to be ("Max Monitors Supported: 2"), though only one of them mentions it in the product name. I suspect the name is based on what features the guy entering it into the system considered to be the most important at that moment. Personally I only plan to have one monitor at home but you never know.

The 256MB one is DDR3 instead of DDR2 ... would that affect your choice?

[samharber.livejournal.com]

Presumeably the DDR3 runs much faster than the DDR2, but I doubt it makes up for having more DDR2 memory.

I'd always go with the more memory option, as this tends not to be upgradeable, unlike clockspeed which can usually be tweaked. Sometimes quite a lot.

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the fastest DDR2 is faster than the cheapest DDR3. There are lots of speeds available. But I agree more memory over speed.

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Most computing tasks are IO bound. In the case of graphics it's the IO cost of shunting stuff across the PCI-E bug into your graphics card. Unless your doing protein folding on your GPU I suggest go for more memory.

[(Anonymous)]

More memory means more space to pre-cache textures. If the game takes advantage of this (most do) then you can use larger textures (making the game world more detailed) without getting "juddering" when switching from one textured area into another (such as going from an outdoor area into a temple) as the now-needed textures are swapped in.

So more memory should give a "smoother" game.

It's not just down to clock speed otherwise - the number of pipes etc. has more of an effect (e.g. it might be running at 80% of the speed, but it's processing 10 things rather than 5 so you get faster updates to the screen).

[masati.livejournal.com]

Could've sworn I was logged in. That was me.