Graphics Card Specs: The Basics

we talk a lot about graphics cards on this channel because most of the time it is the most exciting part of a gaming PC and the biggest contributor to your rigs gaming performance but that means we're talking a lot about technical terms like core clock gddr5 cuda cores our Opie's and so on if you know what all those terms mean good for you gold star but for those of you who don't know for the laymen out there this video should help you understand the basics of what they mean and whether you should be actually paying attention to those when shopping for a new GPU or graphics card the GPU is the actual chip but sometimes we say that it's C this is why we're here let's actually start there the terms graphics card video card and GPU are all used to refer to one of these but the term GPU or graphics processing unit actually only literally means the physical chip on the cards PCB now see I told you this was the basics the reason this distinction is important is that different graphics cards can be based off the same GPU for example the two largest desktop GPU makers AMD and NVIDIA will release a reference version of a new graphics card like the Radeon our X 480 or GeForce GTX 1080 then vendors like MSI asu's gigabyte and so on often sell that reference design but they also designed custom versions with unique coolers IO ports and sometimes a higher clock speed but all those unique versions actually have the same chip at their core so they're not really that unique are they now it's also possible to have two GPUs on one graphics card like AMD's r9 295x2 Radeon Pro duo or Nvidia's Titan Z those can get you tremendous amounts of graphics horsepower but since you're technically running two GPUs the card's performance and games will depend on how well those games support multi GPU performance Nvidia is named for their multi-gpu connection is SLI and AMD's is crossfire sometimes like in the case of invidious 70 and 80 cards like the GTX 970 980 1070 and 1080 2 graphics cards at different tiers will have the same chip I'll be it with some modifications the GTX 970 and 980 are both based off the Maxwell GM 204 GPU while the 1070 and 1080 are based off the Pascal GP 104 now speaking of Maxwell and Pascal you might be aware that those terms refer to the GPU architecture but what is that a GPUs architecture is the platform or technology it's built on new graphics architectures are developed by AMD and NVIDIA around every one to two years and they often shrink the size of the physical components of the processor which allows them to fit more features and transistors onto the GPU die-die meaning the actual silicon in the chip architecture changes can also reduce the amount of power required to run cards for this reason it becomes problematic to come hair different generations of graphics cards based on certain specs alone as separate architectures use the resources available to them differently speaking of those certain specs let's look at the first one memory video memory or video RAM serves the same function as system RAM and that it holds whatever data is currently being accessed by the GPU these are the textures and images that make up what is displayed to you on your screen Veeran becomes especially important when running at higher resolutions if you want to know more about how much vram you might need in the graphics card I wrote an entire video for Linus actually so you can click here for that video for this video we just want to know a couple things having more vram won't automatically get you more frames per second but having not enough could cause textures in game to pop in and out right now it seems like four gigs of V Rams kind of sweet spot for around 1080p with 2 gigs being found on lower end cards that would run with some settings turns down and six to eight gigs allowing the Headroom that's needed for 1440p and 4k again though that's assuming the card has the raw power necessary to run those resolutions in the first place and games will differ from each other in requirements as well some games are super needy and some will take whatever you've got just like people one of the indicators of that raw power I mentioned earlier is the core clock this refers to the frequency at which the GPU is running measured in hertz while this can be used as a general measure to compare the power of different GPUs in one generation it can't reliably be used for comparison between different generations as developments in architecture as we discussed earlier render those comparisons moot graphics cards will often have a boost clock which is what speed the card can boost itself to under a heavy processing load like a video game however that speed will drop back down if it gets too hot which is called thermal throttling and it's also why you want a good cooler on your GPU similarly the video memory runs at a certain speed called the memory clock this is one of a few specs that helps us determine the memory bandwidth the others our memory bus width which is how many bits can travel to and from the vram each clock cycle and the type of memory used in the GPU either gddr5 gddr5 X or HP M which is vertically stacked Ram that we've only seen in AMD's fiji GPU so far memory bandwidth is measured gigabits per second think of it as a tube connecting the GPU to its VRAM the bigger that tube is the more effectively your GPU can use its vram having tons and tons of memory won't do any good if the bandwidth is too small to use all of it at once you can't squeeze an elephant through a tube sock not without some excellent engineering alright it's time to speed this up we're going to go down a typical spec list and give quick definitions for each CUDA cores CUDA stands for compute unified device architecture it's in videos custom programming language CUDA cores are the physical cores in an NVIDIA GPU in AMD GPUs these cores are called stream processors and use the OpenCL programming language we don't compare these across generations and architectures for the same reason we don't do it for core clocks transistor count is another spec that is just what it sounds like the number of transistors in the GPU and you don't need to worry about it except as a fancy high number now these next specs really don't matter unless you're going to do an in-depth technical analysis of a graphics card texture units basically assist in applying textures to 3d models ro peas or raster output pipelines or render operations units it doesn't matter they're involved in the final process of outputting pixels to the display or rendering they also deal heavily with anti-aliasing TDP stands for thermal design power and it's the maximum amount of heat the GPU is specified to produce when running normal applications which is weird because it's measured in watts this doesn't correlate directly to the actual amount of power consumed though so don't worry too much about its specific value unless you're doing some in-depth testing in which case you probably wouldn't be watching this video anyways manufacturing process of a GPU refers to the 1/2 pitch of a memory cell in a processor or half the distance between identical features it's measured in nanometers and a new process is developed every 2 to 3 years AMD's rx 480 is made on a 40 nanometer process and Nvidia Sten series GPUs are made on a 16 nanometer process which is why this generation of GPUs has a pretty big performance leap over last gens 22 nanometer processors alright so that's it for the rundown for specs if all these different specs don't really help you when you're looking to buy a GPU what should you look for benchmarks the only real way to know how a card is going to run is to run it specs can give a general idea of how a card might perform relative to one another but there's no way to know for sure until you actually put it to the test so before you purchase a graphics card do your research read and watch reviews of that card compared to other cards and then you can make an informed decision well I think that's about enough of that hopefully for the uninformed out there this video helped clear things up a bit if you want to see more you can click here to watch more videos follow us on Twitter over here or like the video and subscribe to NCIX tech tips now to put all of these back in their boxes so I don't ruin you

Channel: NCIX Tech Tips

Views: 755,418

Rating: 4.9064846 out of 5

Keywords: Graphics card, GPU, specs, explained, tech tips, what to look for, Nvidia, AMD, Geforce, Radeon, GTX 1080, Titan X, RX 480

Id: IR0e9hdSkI0

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2016