Win 7 indexing graphics numbers

[gbu]

I was having some trouble with my graphics card and borrowed one to test from a friend, the thing is after i checked the Windows Indexing numbers i was surprised to see the 'smaller memory' card had a higher score and wanted to know how the scores are marked on the graphics side.

My card is a ASUS EAH 4350 1Gb Silent card and had a Graphics score of 3.8 and a Gaming Graphics score of 5.8

Friends card is nVidia Geforce 8600 GT 256MB and has a Graphics score of 5.9 and a Gaming Graphics score of 6.4

I thought mine having larger memory would of been a higher score but apparently not?

 

[klepto12]

memory is only a part of the card more is not always better the other card is better overall for gaming imo.

 

[Punkid]

mroe graphics memory wont always give you higher score in the windows index, i have a 9500GT GDDR3 512MB , Grahpics:6.3 , Gaming Graphics 6.4 .....another friend has a 1GB DDR2 variant of 9500GT yet his score is much lower than mine

 

[Leeky]

My HD4670 has an index of 6.7 for both. Only uses DDR2 RAM as well, but has 1GB. Still its not a bad score all things considered - It is my lowest index score though.

 

[gbu]

Thanks for the info, what sort of things should you look for then when buying a card, im not a big gaming person and dont really want to spend more then £50 on a card and thought the one i bought would of been better seeing as it was a 1GB card.

I checked the specs on both cards and thought mine was higher, so whats better about the other card that gives it a higher score?

 

[Arris]

Many things...

Graphics processor unit speed - xxxx Mhz
Memory speed - xxxx Mhz
Memory bandwidth
Shader unit count - number of units

Quite a lot of baffling technological terms to deal with. GFLOPs for floating point calculation performance etc etc..

But usually you can look for benchmarks of the card you have/are considering buying in the games you are playing which usually have results in average fps (frames per second).

A resource I often refer to for a rough idea of how well a card performs is Tomshardware. They often collate all the testing done with different hardware into big charts so you can easily compare them.

For instance this one is a sum of benchmarks @1680x1050 resolution(many different games tested) for each card.

8600 GT 256mb - 242.40 combined benchmark.
HD 4350 256mb - 109.90 combined benchmark.

Larger amounts of memory help when you are running higher resolutions as it allows for loading of larger textures and graphics data into the video cards memory rather than having to fetch from system memory constantly. Many card vendors are guilty of putting excessive amounts of video memory on lower specification cards to make the seem better deals to consumers, but often these cards don't have the performance to use higher resolutions so don't really need the 1gb or more of memory.

My work computer has a 4350 256mb card in it and it really isn't a gaming card despite the fancy art work that was on the box it came in
Unfortunately you are probably going to be in the £80-£100 mark before you get something that gives decent performance( ATI 5770, Maybe a good deal on a GTX 460).

 

[Mizzou]

Although it's still a work in process, AnandTech has a Bench beta that let's you compare two hardware components head to head. Currently has categories for CPU, GPU, SSD plus Smartphones for 2010 and 2011.

Here's the link AnandTech Bench Beta ... it's pretty cool for making quick comparisions.

 

[gbu]

Thanks for the links and the replies everyone that has taught me something new

 

[Punkid]

by the way, i just updated my graphics drivers and my 9500gt score went up to 6.5 for both, gaming graphics and windows aero graphics..