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Please, enlighten me...

hp7909

hp7909

hp7909

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...why or how does Bus Width make such a big difference in graphics card, i.e. 128 Bits against 256 Bits?

Point me to an informative article if you have to.
 
I'm no expert, but I will have a go at this one. I believe you are talking about memory bandwidth, so obviously the more data you can push about, the faster things become.

Whilst very important, there are also many other factors that contribute to the overall speed of a graphics card, ie memory speed, and there are instances when a very cheap/poor 256bit bus card will underperform compared to a good 128bit bus card.
 
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BubbySoup said:
I'm no expert, but I will have a go at this one. I believe you are talking about memory bandwidth, so obviously the more data you can push about, the faster things become.

Whilst very important, there are also many other factors that contribute to the overall speed of a graphics card, ie memory speed, and there are instances when a very cheap/poor 256bit bus card will underperform compared to a good 128bit bus card.
Click to expand...
an example of this is the 6600GT compared to a 9800Pro the pro is 256Bit memory interface while the 6600GT is 128Bit afaik?
this isnt always the case but most of the time it is.
 
Cheers guys

Was asking because I moved from a 9800pro to a X700 (long story). Not noticed much difference cos obviusly the X700 has improvemnts in many other areas over the 9800pro despite having a 128-bit bus width.

Just think they should produce all cards with 256-bit or is it a cost saving measure? or they just don't want a cheap card performing as good as the more expensive one?
 
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i always found refering to bus widths easier by visualising it as a motorway, the more lanes there are, the greater volume of traffic can move through, same with bus' i think, the greater the buswidth, the more memory traffic can be handled at a greater speed making it more efficient, makes no difference however if the GPU cannot handle the information its being presented with
 
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