Compare DDR3 and GDDR5 | Important differences

Video cards in com­put­ers are con­stant­ly evolv­ing, and their evo­lu­tion is in leaps and bounds. It would seem that even 10–15 years ago, even 128 megabytes of video mem­o­ry and 560 mega­hertz of the clock fre­quen­cy of the video proces­sor was a top-end, unat­tain­able solu­tion for most “mere mor­tals”. And now — out RTX, 1.6 GHz video proces­sor, 4352 CUDA cores, 12 GB of mem­o­ry …

How­ev­er, there is some­thing in com­mon between the “new” top-end video cards and the “old” ones — they are also inac­ces­si­ble to “mere mor­tals”. There­fore, peo­ple who want to buy a gam­ing com­put­er, but do not want to sell a kid­ney and a car, have to choose some kind of com­pro­mise solu­tion. And find­ing the right mod­el is not as easy as we would like.

Indeed, in the mid­dle and low­er price seg­ments, the bat­tle of tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics begins. A lot of infor­ma­tion is dumped on the user — about the cores, about the fre­quen­cy, about the dis­plays, about the video mem­o­ry … What to pay atten­tion to and what to ignore?

One of the most impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics that deter­mine the per­for­mance of a video card is the type of video mem­o­ry. And in this arti­cle we will ana­lyze what is the dif­fer­ence between DDR3 and GDDR5, and also decide which graph­ics accel­er­a­tor to choose.

DDR3 video memory

DDR3 video mem­o­ry (also called GDDR3, Graph­ics DDR3) is now obso­lete. Graph­ics accel­er­a­tors equipped with it were pro­duced from 2004 to 2015–2016. Then she lost her only advan­tage in com­par­i­son with the next gen­er­a­tion — the price. GDDR5 video cards have become cheap­er.

In gen­er­al, DDR3 video mem­o­ry is char­ac­ter­ized as fol­lows:

1. Max­i­mum clock fre­quen­cy — 2.5 GHz;

2. Pow­er con­sump­tion — 2 V;

3. 2 trans­mit­ted bits per clock.

Thus, only low-per­for­mance video cards are equipped with DDR3 mem­o­ry. Of course, in 2010 they were the height of pow­er and per­fec­tion, but this date is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent out­side the win­dow. On a com­put­er equipped with a DDR3 video card, it will not be pos­si­ble to “run” in mod­ern games.

The only advan­tage of DDR3 is the rel­a­tive­ly low price. Buy­ing a con­fig­u­ra­tion with 4 GB of video mem­o­ry in 2019 for 60 $ is more than real­is­tic. For a device with the same vol­ume and a sim­i­lar graph­ics accel­er­a­tor, but on DDR5, you will have to pay twice as much at best.

So, let’s sum up.

Video cards with DDR3 video mem­o­ry are a bud­get solu­tion that is designed for office and home com­put­ers. They are “plugs” used exclu­sive­ly for video out­put. It will be pos­si­ble to play on com­put­ers with such video cards only in the old “titles” — projects that were released approx­i­mate­ly before 2011–2012.

In addi­tion, so-called pro­fes­sion­al video cards are also equipped with DDR3 mem­o­ry. These graph­ics accel­er­a­tors are used pri­mar­i­ly for cre­at­ing 3D mod­els, cal­cu­lat­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and per­form­ing mul­ti-thread­ed math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions. And they are also cheap­er than GDDR5 mod­els, so DDR3 con­fig­u­ra­tions can be used in bud­get orga­ni­za­tions and home servers that run arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence or some­thing like that.

GDDR5 video memory

GDDR5 video mem­o­ry is a new gen­er­a­tion of media that is cur­rent at the time of writ­ing this mate­r­i­al (June 2019). It is she who is installed in the vast major­i­ty of graph­ics accel­er­a­tors — from bud­get to top, from mobile to desk­top. It is designed from the ground up specif­i­cal­ly for use in graph­ics cards, result­ing in high per­for­mance.

AMD has been releas­ing its GDDR5 graph­ics cards since 2008. NVIDIA delayed a lit­tle — the release of the first device on this mem­o­ry took place in 2010.

In gen­er­al, GDDR5 is char­ac­ter­ized as fol­lows:

1. The max­i­mum clock fre­quen­cy is 7 GHz (but in prac­tice it prac­ti­cal­ly does not occur, unlike 4–5 GHz);

2. Pow­er con­sump­tion — 1.5 V;

3. 4 trans­mit­ted bits per clock.

All this makes the GDDR5 stan­dard a very pro­duc­tive video mem­o­ry. The speed of its work is also indi­cat­ed by the fact that in some game con­soles (in par­tic­u­lar PS4) and serv­er con­fig­u­ra­tions that require max­i­mum per­for­mance com­bined with fault tol­er­ance, the GDDR5 mod­ule is used as a “RAM”.

So, let’s sum up.

Video cards with GDDR5 video mem­o­ry are a mod­ern solu­tion that meets the cur­rent per­for­mance require­ments. Dou­ble the speed of DDR3, you can quick­ly access any shaders, libraries, and objects stored on GDDR5 dri­ves.

GDDR5 in 2019 is equipped with graph­ics accel­er­a­tors of all class­es — bud­get, mid-range, and top-end. The ques­tion is only in the vol­ume and per­for­mance of the ker­nel. In addi­tion, it is worth con­sid­er­ing that the spe­cif­ic speed depends on the mod­el of the video card, its man­u­fac­tur­er, and some oth­er para­me­ters.

Comparison

So, DRR3 is cheap­er, and GDDR5 is more pro­duc­tive. But the dif­fer­ence between them is not lim­it­ed to this.

Let’s com­pare two stan­dards:

In gen­er­al, the “bud­get” DDR3 does not jus­ti­fy the sav­ings. Now it is bet­ter to take options on GDDR5.