330m vs. 335m

quick and possibly stupid question: i've seen the macbook pro advertised with both a nvidia gt330m and a gt335m. is the 512mb card in the core i7 15" the 335m -- specifically, is the only difference between the 330m and the 335m the amount of video ram? if i'm wrong, do ALL macbook pro 15/17" have the 330m only, and why do i see articles noting the 335m as part of the current macbook pro 15/17" build? confusion abounds.

 

335M is not available in the MacBook Pro line. it never has been.

the 330M is available in the 15" and 17" MBP.

the difference between the 2 cards, so far as I'm aware, is a higher clock speed in the 335M.

 

330m = 48 CUDA cores
335m = 72 CUDA cores

 

real world gaming difference ??

 

20 - 35% roughly depending on the application and what the chips are clocked at

 

is he possibly referring to the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256MB or 512MB GDDR3 memory

 

As long as both GT 330M models have GDDR3 (which I'm pretty sure they do), the difference in memory make no difference in any real life situation or game.

 

thats not necessarily true...

 

video memory makes all the difference ! I would take a larger video memory over faster memory any day! speed is worth nothing if you choke at data amount before being able to utilize the speed.

 

You are mistaken. No MBP has ever shipped with a 335m. Only the 330m is available.

 

A GT 330M 256MB GDDR3 would perform better than a GT 330M 512MB DDR2. There are numerous reviews on older GPUs showing that increasing memory size typically past 2x the bus width yields much diminishing returns. And memory speed is much more important than memory size, again search the forum and see people reviewing identical cards with the different types of memory.

 

QFT

Bronsky

 

That is not correct, because in modern games you are going to have at least 512mb of video memory instantly ! if you compare 1.5 GB with 2.0 GB then yes! But at the low amount the speed isn't enough. Games like starcraft II and WOW will suffer badly from lower amount of video RAM compared to RAM speed.

 

1. the benchmarks say otherwise.

2. you can't use all the memory instantly anyway. you only have a certain amount of bandwidth to the video memory, so you can only access a subset of the memory per cycle. also, it is pretty common to have manufacturers shove a lot of memory onto weaker graphics cards, but it is way too expensive to throw in ridiculously fast memory. obviously, at some point, having too little memory would start seriously impacting performance compared to memory speed (if you continue to reduce the memory amount), but commonly, and this case is included, manufacturers tend to err on the safe side with memory quantity.