Most of the time, that’d be higher quality textures, anti-aliasing effects, and some fixed function processing. The differences should be exaggerated in games where shaders are lighter load, as memory bandwidth is likely to be more utilized.Īnything that relies on high memory occupancy will strain the GPU’s memory bandwidth. Anti-aliasing, temporal effects, scales and transforms where data needs to be retained in memory, and so forth. Texture sampling is a big one, or anything else that collects samples for processing. This difference alone is massive, but nVidia also changed the reference clock speeds on the DDR4 version of the GT 1030 by over 100MHz, in some cases.Īs for what strains memory bandwidth, it’s just about everything in computer graphics. The result is about 48GB/s, whereas the GT 1030 with DDR4 amounts to approximately 16GB/s memory bandwidth. The original GT 1030 carries about 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, calculated by taking memory bus width, divided by 8 to convert width to bytes, multiplied by memory clock, by 2 for DDR, and by 2 for GDDR5. What we’ve never seen before, though, is DDR4 stuck to a card that would typically have GDDR5. We’ve seen this with Vega and with some other high-end graphics devices. Graphics devices are extremely bound by memory bandwidth. ![]() NVidia has made a lot of great products in the past year – and we’ve even recommended the GT 1030 GDDR5 card in some instances, which is rare for us – but the DDR4 version under the same name was a mistake. The GT 1030 with DDR4 is one of the most egregious missteps we’ve seen when it comes to product marketing. On average, particularly on Newegg, there is about a $10 difference between the two cards. If someone looks up GT 1030 benchmarks, they’ll find our GDDR5 version tests, and those results are wildly different from the similarly priced GT 1030 DDR4 card’s performance. In a previous rant, we railed against these choices because it misleads consumers – whether intentionally or unintentionally – into purchasing a product that doesn’t reflect the benchmarks. It’s time to benchmark the GT 1030 versus the GT 1030 Bad Edition, which ships with DDR4 instead of GDDR5, but has the same name as the original product. Earlier this year, even GTX 1050s and RX 550s had evaporated, leaving only overpriced GT 1030 GDDR5 cards (that we were somewhat OK with recommending). Typically, the GT 1030 – or similarly ultra-low-end cards – would not get our recommendation, as a GTX 1050 or RX 550 would make more sense and be close in price. The GT 1030 has always been an interesting product, and that’s only true because of the mining boom and GPU scarcity issues of earlier this year. The memory bandwidth reduction is several-fold, dropping from 48GB/s to about 16GB/s with DDR4, but the part that’s truly wrong is that they used the same product name. ![]() It’s actually getting system memory on it, which is a tremendous downgrade. NVidia has taken a relatively successful card, the GT 1030, and has implanted DDR4 in place of GDDR5. This is something we haven’t seen before.
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