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    Bus Speed

    Discussion in 'Gaming (Software and Graphics Cards)' started by rafastv, May 16, 2008.

  1. rafastv

    rafastv Newbie

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    I've already heard many times that a video card don't use all the memory it's available to them for many reasons. But technically, I don't agree with most of the arguments made, since I have a video card with bus width of 64 bits and frequency of clock 350 MHz, shouldn't I expect transfers of 2.800MB/s?
    That said, if I had a 2GB video card, it should be able to use all the memory or should not?
    Am I missing something here?
    Ok, I agree, it depends on screen resolution...but if you do your homework and calculate which resolution its best for your video card, shouldn't it work?

    Thanks for any advice or help,
     
    rafastv, May 16, 2008
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  2. sirmetman

    sirmetman Notebook Virtuoso

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    Could someone provide some links to the technical reasons for the memory limitations of GPUs? I don't doubt the truth of them, but I haven't been able to find anything useful with google, only stuff about the issue with mapped memory taking out part of the 4GB memory space in 32 bit OSes. I'd like to understand the issue about VRAM utilization a bit better.
     
    sirmetman, May 16, 2008
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  3. WILLY S

    WILLY S I was saying boo-urns

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    WILLY S, May 16, 2008
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  4. sirmetman

    sirmetman Notebook Virtuoso

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    Great, thanks. I'll have to take a read of that.
     
    sirmetman, May 16, 2008
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  5. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    You are aware that there are more things involved than just the clock speed when it comes to bus usage right? For example, collision detection, latency, buffer size, memory speed will all effect the actual bus throughput at any one moment. Currently buses are large to ensure that they do not bottleneck the system.
     
    Budding, May 16, 2008
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  6. rafastv

    rafastv Newbie

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    @Willy S: Thanks for the article :)
    @Budding: I'm well aware, but even if the firmware had a really dumb algorithm to prevent or control those factors and only 10% of this speed really worked, even then you'd have 280 MB/s which is enough to fill up the memory of a low end video card(ignoring completely the fact that may occur more than one data transfer per cycle).
    I suspect really that most games don't use the true potential of the video cards, but that doens't mean they can't ;-).
     
    rafastv, May 16, 2008
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