Rank the attributes of a good Graphics card in order of importance.

[JButlerUK]

Can i just ask, when looking at a Graphics card what are THE MOST! important attributes, obviously i look at things like:

- Core Clock
- Memory
- Memory Clock

But what about:

- Processing Cores
- Shader Clock

Someone rank the attributes of a graphics card in order of importance. When i look at a G card what is the one thing i should ensure is top?

(this should be fun...)

GO!

 

[JButlerUK]

For example: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 SOC WINDFORCE 3X 1280MB

- Core Clock: 845MHz
- Memory: 1280MB GDDR5
- Memory Clock: 3800MHz
- Processing Cores: 480
- Shader Clock: 1690MHz

Out of those which are the most important to be looking at and why?

 

[JButlerUK]

Ok lol, but could anyone explain what the bits in the spec actually mean?

 

[JButlerUK]

The problem is that there is no hard and fast rule for deciphering the specs of a card - you can work out roughly what performance you should expect relative to other cards but the best thing is just to go by benchmarks.

Even the specs you have quoted don't tell the whole story, you are missing memory interface which is just as important as the memory clock - something with a 128bit bus is going to be a lot slower than 256bit for example.

Explains a lot, thank you.

So what is the best card for £300 at the moment?

 

[JButlerUK]

Makes sense.

Go for brand rather than spec...