Memory Clock Speeds

[Cleancookie97]

I know this may sound slightly stupid. But I want to find out how exactly does the memory clock speed in my graphics card help with performance? I tried over-clocking my ATI Radeon HD 5450 (512mb)'s memory clock speed and it didn't seem to effect my fps much, 50fps(400MHz) to ~51(650)

 

[hunter315]

Memory bandwidth is only important up to a certain point for general stuff, but for memory intensive stuff like Anti Aliasing, you need more bandwidth to be able to feed the GPU fast enough. It would be much harder to test with a card like a 5450 as AA will crush its frame rates just due to the extra computations needed and not due to the need for additional memory bandwidth.

For a card that weak, the core clock is by far the more limiting clock speed, lower end cards tend to have way more memory and way more memory bandwidth than they can use to start with so boosting the memory clock wont do you much good if any.

 

[geekapproved]

Memory overclocking doesn't do much but shorten the memories life.

Raising the core frequency however will yield performance gains.