7 myths about video cards
Still think video card power is measured in gigabytes? Are you afraid that the card might burn out? In this article we'll break down the main rumors and myths.
Nvidia SLI or AMD CrossFireX dramatically increase the performance of video cards and the amount of video memory. Not all manufacturers create games with support for 2 or more video cards. That's why in practice, in games, the performance gain can be both negative and positive. In the second case - no more than 30%. It makes sense to apply this technology to special computing programs that support the use of several graphics processors. About video memory: in games that use DirectX 11 and below, only the memory of one card is used. Moreover, the one that has a smaller volume, if in a bundle installed several cards with different amounts of memory. With DirectX 12, the full capacity of all video cards will be used.
The video card not being exposed by the processor is not great. If the load on the video card is below 100%, it means that it is partially idle and, ostensibly, performance is lost in the process. In fact, it is possible to load the card with almost any CPU. Depending on the power, the CPU prepares N frames per second for the video card. To load the card at 100%, the CPU must produce more FPS than the GPU. It is easy to achieve this by raising the screen resolution in the game settings, improving antialiasing, ultra graphics settings, but it works if the number of frames per second is satisfactory and the video card is idle a little. Then the picture will be better, the load will increase, but the FPS will not change. If the processor in the game is fully occupied, and changes in graphics settings do not lead to an increase in frames per second, think about a reasonable balanced computer assembly. How to build - see on the same channel.
The video card lacks video memory, games will freeze and crash. In fact, the video card has direct access to the computer's RAM. RAM is much slower and can ruin the smoothness of the game, but only if the card lacks memory too much. If it lacks a couple hundred MB - FPS will drop slightly. In practice it will not be noticeable. GPUs efficiently use available resources, so the RAM stores data that are rarely used.
Overclocking video memory is pointless. Memory overclocking does not give such a performance boost as video core, but it is also useful. If you overclock video memory by 10%-15% you can get about +5% to FPS.
Overclocking causes video cards to burn out. Manufacturers often overclock video cards right at the factory, so there are many modifications of the same card at once. In practice, they can only burn up if you manually increase the voltage or voltage together with frequencies. If you increase only the frequencies, the card will warm up a bit more. A video card has a certain temperature margin that it can withstand. For modern cards the critical temperature is 90-95°C. There is also a parameter in the drivers that forcibly reduces the frequency at 80-85°C. With a strong increase in frequencies, the maximum computer will produce blue screens or video driver error. Not all models are designed for overclocking not declared by the manufacturer.
A modern graphics card will perform worse in an older motherboard with a PCI-E 2.0 slot. PCI-E 3.0 has almost twice the bandwidth of PCI-E 2.0. In practice, even top-of-the-line graphics cards are fully sufficient for PCI-E 2.0. There is almost no difference in these slots.
The more video memory, the more powerful the video card. This myth grew up long ago, when some manufacturers and localizers of games specified not the name of the video card, but the size of video memory in the system requirements.
In those days, the size of the cards memory was equal to the power of the video processor. And nowadays, stronger graphics cards usually have more memory: a GeForce GTX 1660 with 6GB GDDR5 will be more powerful than a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB GDDR5. However, since a long time ago, some manufacturers create deliberately weak video cards with large video memory.
These cards will not produce even 20FPS in games at graphics settings that take up all the video memory. Many games that run more or less smoothly and stably on these cards will not utilize memory more than half at recommended settings. Manufacturers only sell extra memory.
And here's another example: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB GDDR5 is much weaker than GeForce GTX 1060 with 3GB GDDR5X. Though the card has more memory, the video memory is slower and also fewer CUDA cores. Therefore, you should not compare the performance of video cards only by the amount of memory.
