From what I know Nvidia create cards with high memory clock and low memory bus and AMD creates cards with low memory clock and high memory bus.

  1. What is the difference for customers like us (gamers)?

  2. And what is the difference overall? (something like you can write whole page and than send it or write and send 1 word every few seconds?)

  3. And why no one creates cards with both high memory clock and high memory bus?

5 years ago

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  1. For customers there's no difference. What matters is the final number: multiplication of bus width and frequency, that'll give you the transfer rate. Higher memory width is more expensive to manufacture (each bit width is an actual physical lane and is the total amount of pins in the memory chips dedicated to transfer data), and higher memory clock is harder to achieve.

  2. The frequency determines how many transfers can be done per second (2 per cycle, actually), and the bus width how many bits are transferred simultaneously.

  3. Power requirements and heat are important limiting factors. Also, having too much transfer rate becomes useless. Just look at AMD cards with HBM2, they have much higher transfer rates but don't really perform better than the equivalent nVidia with GDDR5. In other words: it's useless transferring more data than the GPU is going to be able to process.

edit:
I'm going to add something that I'm not sure to what extend is a problem in this case: transferring data over parallel lanes creates interference due to electromagnetic induction (this is why ethernet cables are twisted, to minimize interference). So if you have many parallel lanes sending and receiving data, there are interferences affecting each other. This interference increase as you increase the frecuency of the signal, so in theory, it's harder to have higher clocks with more lanes.

5 years ago*
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Thank you for your answer!

Now I feel smarter!

5 years ago
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This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

5 years ago
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Thank you for the links. It is good to learn something new :)

5 years ago
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Closed 5 years ago by Zarddin.