I am looking for a graphics card, can someone please tell me what each of
these means?
Memory Bandwidth
Fill Rate
Vertices per Second
Maximum Memory
obviously I assumed the higher the better, but what do each of these
translate into.
'Fill rate' can affect FPS at high resolutions.
'Vertices pS' can affect FPS at high 3D detail level of the games.
'Memory bandwidth', - same with both.
Memory is good for storing various 'buffers'. Aside from the
framebuffers there's also a number of dataconstructs that hook into
the transformation pipeline during rendering. These have to reside in
the graphic card. Then you have the texture maps, which are mapped
onto the vertices. These too, should preferably reside in the card.
The more powerful card you have, the greater resolutions and detail
levels you can run it at. This also demands higher resolution texture
maps, taking up more ram, and also more of them. Also buffers will be
bigger. All in all, high performance cards needs more memory, in order
to make sense. Traversing all that memory, in turn demands higher
memory bandwidths. Everything fits together. Which is why some
'crippled' budget cards, ATI's SE versions in mind, sometimes fail
dramatically. nVidia's budget approach, clocking things more
conservatively, and using cheaper components, like ram, is far
superior.
Something all these numbers don't consider, is the power of the tensor
transformation engines and 'shaders' of the GPU's on the cards.
For instance, a cheap GF MX card can rate well on all those four
spec's. A game with sophisticated effects, will still run many, many
times faster on a 'Ti' or 'FX' card.
ancra
