What difference does the memory make?

[shbris]

when will nvidia move to ddr5?

[transylvanic]

As Salzaar said 256bit bus happened a while ago, nvidia did take the next step with 320bit on the old 8800gts 320mb & 640mb and 384bit with the 8800gtx and ultra, however that step was very short lived as the memory&controller was simply too expensive and pushed the prices of thoes cards up quite high.
They then went back to 256bit on most of the 9 series cards and have again stepped out into 448bit on gtx260&295 and 512bit on the gtx280&285.

ATi has stuck with 256bit but have but have moved up to gddr4 and 5 on their top end cards.

Thanks again. This info would have taken me a day to put together.

[kalniel]

Thanks fellas. That is enlightening. So when did the move to 256-bit pathways happen? When should we expect the jump to 512?

ATI actually used 512-bit way back in the 2900 series cards. The problem is that such a wide interface requires a lot of connections to and from the chip to the memory. That's fine if you have a physically big chip, but when companies try to shrink the size of the chip (meaning they can stamp more out of the same bit of substrate) it becomes trickier. Hence why ATI switched back to 256-bit for their latest series of cards. nVidia's latest high end chips are 512-bit, but they're also enormous.

It's a funny one because playing prince of persia I get the same rubbish frame rates at 800x600 as I do at 1680x1050.

To me that suggests that something else in your system is holding you back, like your CPU.

[transylvanic]

what is the performance difference between a 512MB and 1GB 4850 or 4830?

Just to answer my own question using Fallout 3 as a case study.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/images...Mm61_7_5_l.gif