DDR Memory vs GDDR Memory as Fast As Possible

GDDR RAM (for graphics cards) and DDR RAM (for computers) are SIMILAR, but also quite different from each other. This video explains the difference in just a few minutes!
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[@probablynotabigtoe9407]

6years later and GDDR6 is here and DDR5 is almost here. And Linus has a beard

[@omkarvaidya25]

"and linus has a beard" the most significant thing here

[@hamezz2551]

And 9 months after you commented this GDDR6 is the norm and DDR5 is months away

[@Technobridger]

yes linus is very skinny

[@kyle_mk17]

He does have a beard, he's kinda hot.

[@koustubhjain6789]

This somehow rhymes

[@malteeaser101]

GDDR 5 RAM is better than DDR 3 RAM because it has more letters in it, and the number is higher.

[@cIappo896]

That's the basic guide for beginners.

[@malteeaser101]

Yeah, as flippant as it sounds, it usually is the case, haha.

[@IDMYM8]

i still believe in this theory after watching the video

[@chukwudiilozue9171]

Somehow, that's true for most technologies, case in point 46 vs. 4G LTE and PCI vs PCI Express

[@Loler03]

Controversy Owl o

[@ChrisPC39]

1 year later and we have ddr4

[@connorwilding2557]

I have ddr4

[@liamamezaga3507]

few months later......GDDR5X

[@omaraloud8648]

+Liam Amezaga in 6 to 12 months, HBM 2 on the new 1080ti and titan!

[@Aaronsitooo]

Titan X pascal uses GDRR5X xD

[@javiergarcia1372]

Now 1080ti only gddr5

[@AnonymityIx]

lol how many channels is this guy on. ive seen 3 now

[@ratbo]

Ncix, linustechtips, Linuscattips, channelsuperfun... Maybe more?

[@bordercollie21games9]

[@bordercollie21games9]

***** techquickie

[@kirstenleewapasshorse3645]

***** He's even on some videos where he is at a tech convention explaining products. He's pretty much everywhere technologically related.

[@Happytylermovieproducction]

border collie21 games That Linus's Another Account TechQuickie Also Known As Quick Talk

[@TheBrinkofDestruction]

Quit HORSING... around... eh?

[@drivedoodle]

^

[@Miguelena-mx3qx]

No...just...no...

[@lutyanoalves444]

NO GOD PLZ NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[@yaltschuler]

+Mr. Littlenewo I have an old USB cable that says that you can't use it as a noose. I mean, the text is so small, it's a miracle I caught it beforehand! I'm otherwise out of options of what to use for a noose. Got any ideas?

[@aminedr9474]

Lmaaao u just predicted 2018 rewind

[@MrJaryd2000]

Back on track - LOL

[@MrJaryd2000]

GamingGodOwen You're lame...I'M AWESOMEEE!!

[@DizzPants]

GamingGodOwen Calling people dicks are sooo 2010. Get with the times man.

[@DizzPants]

GamingGodOwen Hobbit*

[@MrJaryd2000]

GamingGodOwen Can I just get back to watching my damn KZbin video?

[@Ponlets]

GamingGodOwen lol a hobbit no liek yew

[@ApplesGoneBloopie]

Dam. Those horse puns were pretty good.

[@EthanNZ]

***** Seriously? oh beHAYve >.>

[@EthanNZ]

Can we just stop?? We're all NEIGHbors here. right?

[@yjfuykyil]

These videos are fantastic. I get A LOT of these questions from my friends, and nowadays I usually just guide them here. Very informative for inexperienced users.

[@Floh2802]

But will DDR (Dance Dance Revelution) affect my DDR Ram D:

[@hamzerpanzer]

The RAM requirements for that game are insanely high. At least 128gb

[@Floh2802]

Hamza Aman Oh.

[@hamzerpanzer]

+Floh 2802 Sorry. I meant to say 512gb of RAM. And an intel xeon 10 core cpu. And titan xp's in sli

[@Floh2802]

Hamza Aman Welp gotta get that 0.5 frames

[@toastywf]

actually the min ram is ~1.572 TB and u need a 6950X 10 core 20 thread OCed with liquid nitrogen as cooling and i think it was 3 or 4 titan Xp in sli to get ~1.4 fps

[@lsq7833]

...but... Horse meat is good?

[@MrRyangrrr]

+lsq78 You obviously work at Tesco

[@Kriae]

+lsq78 Yes if you are from Eastern Europe.

[@BoleDaPole]

+lsq78 its too chewy imo

[@eitkoml]

+FDN More like, yes if you like red meat.

[@portaadonai]

Whom of you counted the 74 words... o.O I want names!

[@theramendutchman]

Fons

[@spazzwazzle]

Who*

[@GhostRider-jk4eo]

@@spazzwazzle whom is still a word. who is more commonly used and whom is more formal. looking at the definition of whom I'm pretty sure it fits in this comment

[@spazzwazzle]

@@GhostRider-jk4eo Don't care, didn't read; I'm dabbing on you right now -dabs-

[@GhostRider-jk4eo]

@@spazzwazzle Why didn't you read it huh? I'm just correcting you because so many people think the word "whom" is wrong or they never heard of it. Correcting people is in me; sometimes I try to avoid it but just can't help it.

[@86BuzzSaw]

Take note console fans, this is the primary reason why the xbox is struggling to display 1080p over the ps4.

[@yizeverienametaken]

no

[@djelectric]

Console fans? You mean peasants.

[@86BuzzSaw]

***** Lets just save any arguement's and say its a combination of the two

[@brickdustwithmilk]

86BuzzSaw Let's just stay above the console peasants and not bother ourselves with them, they can roll in their filth in bliss... And not get any on us.

[@86BuzzSaw]

djelectric That's what I was thinking, but my new years resolution was to be nicer to the less fortunate

[@RealDealHolyfield2099]

Great explanation of DDR and GDDR! I even liked the advertisement/review of Shutterstock at the end. Very convincing!

[@Brian_Fantastic]

I understood most of it, so this helped to round out my knowledge. Also it'll be a nice tool to teach others. What a great idea for a channel!

[@sasquatchcrew]

DDR= System Memory GDDR= Dedicated Graphics Memory

[@dojomojo5085]

The best answer

[@Byrnzi360]

My grandfather used to say, "you'd be lucky if you were getting horse meat."

[@adlerstroke522]

Thanks Linus,i ve learned now the difference between ddr and gddr now,keep up the good advices,hello from France.

[@danpiontek9839]

Ya it helped me. I dont know computer tech pretty much at all but, I am learning as I go so to speak. I gotta tell you tho, when it comes to purchasing anything for my rig I seem to go into a total brain melt with all the choice out there sand being an under average person of the U.S. population in terms of the financial side of things it is important to know the difference between what I can buy and what will work so I dont have to learn the hard way in which seems to be the repeating trend in my life. These type of videos you and other KZbinrs make help us computer users that are uneducated in the subject make better decisions. I can only speak for myself on this but I think they help other people as well. Good channel. I subscribed. Thank you for making them simple enough for everyone to understand. Cheers

[@rjenkins591]

I had an idea of what the difference was, but this clear everything up.

[@abdullahtshabal9522]

$250 a month for a subscription? That's like the monthly rent for a flat...

[@emilioinocentes1123]

Thank you Techquickie for that techie information.

[@simonhoel2704]

its 9 years later and bow ddr5 is becoming the standard for the new amd CPUs.

[@Psychotyzm]

painful jokes... very painful...

[@fatbeard8072]

This video is old and still worth every minute. Thank you for explaining it.

[@BlackBlade4Life]

Well would you look at that. This video is exactly 1 year old. Exactly the day I needed this answer. :)

[@leerman22]

The PS4 uses GDDR5 memory shared between both the CPU and GPU. I guess latency doesn't really matter because it's a dedicated game console.

[@Exile1a]

Graphically it does better. But if one of the games starts taxing the CPU part it will start chugging very quickly.

[@malachihart7370]

the ps4 has a apu and so does the xbox one

[@Exile1a]

Malachi Hart Which inside has Cores designated for Serial Computing and Parallel computing. A CPU part and a GPU part. An APU is a hybrid with to processors integrated into one. That still means that when the CPU part is taxed it will be hindered by the GDDR5 Memory.

[@NikolaiHT]

you are the only youtuber that puts "dislike it if you disliked it" as an option. That's great! I like that.

[@surfmonktutt]

Love the tech tips! The puns that make you groan are just an added bonus. Cheers!

[@toshineon]

I always heard people say that the PS4 uses GDDR5 as system memory. If this video is true then that doesn't make much sense at all.

[@Beckham123Fan]

***** He is correct, but to expand on, PC's have separate CPU's and GPU's. (you might not yet understand what the fuck im on about) The PS4 uses both CPU & GPU in one mechanic. its called something like APU. not to sure.

[@toshineon]

Ah. That explains it. Thank you.

[@karlslicher8520]

The PS4 architecture is approximately 30% faster than a PC with everything matching. It does not have to copy or move the data around in the memory and both the CPU and GPU can work on it at the same time. It will take 12 months for the big 1st party devs to learn how to use it well though. The PS is a less powerful system than a top end PC but this build is literally the easiest system devs have ever had to work with. Sony is hoping that along with the VR headset the easy access for the devs. to the system will make it a must-have for all gamers.

[@Leyvin]

The PlayStation 4 does use GDDR5, which really the main reason they put this down is because well as a Gamer you have no idea what the difference is... all you see is well GDDR5 has a 5, while DDR3 has a 3... 5 > 3 thus PlayStation Better! Or at least that is what the Marketing Dept. at Sony are hoping you will think. Now this gets a little tricky to explain, but basically the number assigned to them (i.e. DDR2, DDR3, GDDR5, etc...) actually relates to the number of lanes available. Image it like a Motorway (Freeway), with Data being the Cars on it. So obviously it makes sense that more Lanes = More Cars, so there for more Data! \o/ Only the thing is that the Motorway is powering Electric Cars running on it, so the more Lanes you have the Slower the Cars have to Drive because there is only so much Electricity to power them. As such while you might have 3 Lanes of Cars Driving at 100MPH on the DDR3 Motorway, on the GDDR5 one you have 5 Lanes driving at 70MPH. What is even more important here is what happens when these Cars reach their destination.... you can imagine this as a Toll Area at the end of the Motorway before entering the City (Processor) Now natively Processors only support 128-bit (i.e. 1 Lane) Data Bus, but when DDR 2 was introduced; AMD brought in Hyper-Transport, which allowed for 2x 128-bit ... this was later expanded when DDR 3 became available to 3x 128-bit. It actually does work almost exactly like a Toll Area too, handling several data lanes at once... serving each Lane so that they perfectly merge into a single Lane without any slow-down. Still if we were to say use GDDR4 / 5 instead, what we would end up with would be a Traffic Jam because there are too many Lanes of Traffic trying to Merge. GPUs don't have this issue as they natively run at 384 - 512-bit ... so there is no need to even have the Toll Area, especially as you match the GDDR3 - 5 with the native Bit Rate of the GPU. Now what was said in the Video about GDDR and DDR in terms of design, is well semi-true. Remember System Memory is by design more General Purpose, so whoever builds the PC can chose the specifications of your Memory. Low-Latency (measured in CLK Rating) is great for Multi-Task Environments, where-as you can also get High-Bandwidth (measured in CAS Rating) which is far better for Large Data Transfers (e.g. Gaming) With Graphics Memory, as you can no longer swap it out (used to be able to back in the 90s) really they just chose a setup based upon the price-range the card is aimed at. Budget Cards tend to get Latency Focused as they're assumed they'll be used for general Windows / Business / Multi-Media stuff, where-as Gaming / High End Cards tend to get Transfer focused to allow for massive file transfers. It is under the hood actually identical to System Memory, with the one exception it never supports additional features like XMP - which I'm just not going to explain here but it's basically a good way of getting Low-Latency Memory to also support Large Transfers. (extraordinary important for Gaming or Video Encoding) Still you might be wondering... "Alright, I think I understand how Memory works now - but this still doesn't explain why the Xbox One uses DDR3 while the PS4 uses GDDR5" And well, unfortunately I don't know the hardware specifications of the PS4 APU unfortunately - so I can't tell you if it's specially designed with a larger Native Bus than is usually on the A12 "Jaguar" APU to make use of the extra Data Lanes or if (and judging by what Sony have previously done) a simple case of an engineer / executive believing it is better thus it should have it regardless if there is a point or not. I could point to some absolutely puzzling design decisions about the PS3 and PS2 where to this day I still cannot explain to you why they would deliberately include something that could never properly be utilised by the system because of the hardware design. This said given that the PS4 does use the System Memory as a Shared GPU / CPU Memory Space, including where the Frame (Back) Buffer is stored (screen output) then it does make sense to use GDDR5. Microsoft on the other hand opted to include 32MB of eSRAM, which is basically dedicated memory built-in to the GPU component(s) of the APU to handle this then use the cheaper and more reliable DDR3. Which suits their console far more given it does run on Desktop Windows 8, so it realistically needs the Low-Latency a bit more than High Bandwidth. Really at the end of the day were not talking about a major difference right now in terms of performance, but in a couple of years when Developers are trying to really squeeze performance out of these machines the design of the Xbox One lends itself far better to this - while the PS4 has a good chance of being CPU (well APU I guess lol) bound in terms of Performance.

[@toshineon]

Leyvin360 Wow. Impressive explanation.

[@runninglate9672]

DDR ram is ram and gddr ram is gaming ram on life support that's supported by ram, hence both are important.

[@firegames1001]

This shop you showed exist today. You made yojr work good

[@Kue7heh]

2:00 Ah yes, my favourite animal - corse.

[@reece2080]

this vid helped so much linus thanks keep at it!

[@MrOlyevo]

The second option Linus! Only a noob would not know the difference between ddr and gddr.

[@gustavo765rs]

I guess the focus of his videos are for that kind of people man

[@musharioh]

well those small difference can be lost and hard to find for PC beginners even when they seems very obvious to the experts.. it's good to have a series where you can get a primitive info..

[@pscottyxx]

google the word noob and understand it before telling people that their noobs..

[@nikolaivii5766]

***** GabeN to that! It's amazing how confident the ignorant serfs seem when they boast about their PS4's GDDR5 RAM and how it beats PC's DDR3. Ughhh.

[@skifree0]

Nikolai Azerbaijan well it can be very beneficial but not in the sense of the hardware. with proper optimization having gddr5 can be a good choice. If game devs tap into huma, objects stored in the shared ram doesn't have to be sent through pcie lanes to the gpu. and there is less memory references to deal with, since the cpu data can be sent into memory can be instantly manipulated by the gpu (normally the data is sent from cpu into the frame buffer then the gpu gets to work on it)

[@Markgb3]

I am a horse and I am severely offended that you killed my family to make this video.

[@rompecolas1]

Correction: the GPU in a graphics card interacts directly with it's own memory. Cause the GPUs used on APUs or motherboards interact with the system memory.

[@Drives31forhalo]

you should go through the advantages and disadvantages of partitions

[@techandtipsgamer8286]

Oh this Linus and his jokes

[@perez9619]

No one cares if your first comment, I came here for knowledge. Not stupid kids,who claim first comment.

[@LukePTBA]

Your comment is just as pointless, watch the video and stop letting a comment section upset you.

[@perez9619]

***** Oh come on, is doesn't get you annoyed when they do that?

[@XxDREADFULLxX]

wolfstar Lol why do people get annoyed at people who do that?? You wouldn't even see it if you clicked on the video 5 minutes later....

[@LukePTBA]

I honestly don't give a fuck. I'm more annoyed that people don't recognise the redundancy in posting a pointless comment about yet another pointless comment.

[@perez9619]

***** You don't have to be rude jeez.

[@aldrinjaredbravo2454]

thank you for the explanation sir because im i bit confused the difference of the drivers. thanks for the tutorial video it really helps me to acquire knowlege about pc.'s.

[@Gunner_182]

That's why the APU isn't suitable for gaming yet, because if you a GDDR5 GPU in crossfire with your APU that uses DDR3 system memory, your overall RAM will be brought down to DDR3 thus making your dedicated GPU redundant.

[@mikev.7361]

good stuff, I had a general understanding of both type of rams. This just made things clearer haha. Thanks Linus

[@Cicirifu]

In all seriousness, horse is a delicacy. Just don't mix unknown horse with my beef without telling me.

[@zt1234567890]

So, shortly explained: It's like the differene between a long distance runner and a sprinter. One is extremely good in it's field, but not in the other's?

[@angelcaru]

2:37 High-res game textures *shows low-res Space Invaders textures*

[@nathanielrae9601]

Bad puns and inappropriate jokes? Yes, that's why this is the best.

[@abuzzedwhaler7949]

have you ever noticed that a graphics card is like a computer of it's own, it has it's own processor, ram and motherboard

[@2EXTREME2008]

So let me get this straight: *DDR* Memory handles *multiple* types of data in *small* chunks for more *speed* while *GDDR* Memory handles *specific* types of data in *large* chunks for better *performance*. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[@BandNerdcp]

Pretty much nailed it, yeah.

[@TonyHookedonVanlife]

I'd have no problem whatsoever eating horse meat... re: RAM types - I am a old fart. I remember when just plain old DDR(no 2 or 3) was the new hot thing. ;0)

[@rich1051414]

Yes, and before that, everyone thought RDRAM would make sdram obsolete. DDR is still sdram, so, so much for that idea.

[@nychold]

I remember putting the 30 pin SIMMs in my 386, and being psyched about the new 72 pin SIMMs in my parents' new 486. If DDR RAM makes you an old fart, I must be ancient. :)

[@Premislao89]

nychold i remember when sharpened stones on sticks were dream of every hunter... xD

[@CyberJellos]

I remember when we hunted dinosaurs and watched black and white tv.

[@TonyHookedonVanlife]

I really DID watch black & white television, smartass... with a dial, no push buttons(and only about 4 channels). A remote? That was space movie stuff.

[@kujalanville]

and here we are looking at GDDR 6 now

[@dvem4e]

Actually horse meat is good and tasty :D

[@cre8ive65]

You eat at Ikea too I see... ^.-

[@dvem4e]

:D lol no never :D in my country there is a special flat sausage that is like 20 - 40% horse meat and in Belgium or France there is a flat sausage that is 99% horse :D

[@cre8ive65]

Cool, I wonder why it inst as popular as beef, chicken, etc

[@Jonathan.R.Pereira]

cre8ive65 Because no one wants to "Horse" around ...

[@dvem4e]

:D its not as popular caz if you eat to much of it or just often its not good for you, i got some kined of toxins and shit...talking bout TOXIC i got (R9 270x toxic) for 3 days now :D AND DAMN ITS A NICE CARD :D

[@jimitsoni18]

so the memory bandwidth of ddr4 is 94 Gbps whereas that of gddrgx is 21Gbps so performance of ddr4 should be better than gddr6x, so why dont we use system memory for vram

[@thepandamc4093]

My friend thought GDDR5 was a slot and thought his new gpu wouldnt fit because it was GDDR6 and it took me a week to make him understand that GDDR is ram for a gpu and not a slot

[@kingoftrolls]

I can tell you how great it is that when a noob asks this question, I can just slap em with this vid, thanks linus

[@rudysonestanislao1169]

Thanks hahah :D shutterstock

[@yaosio]

Thank you for the explanation Mr. Linux.

[@DavidGreen1993]

Would have been nice to cover APUs and why they like high bandwidth RAM

[@이주연-x4x]

The CPU just tells the GPU what to do.

[@stan0033x]

DDR5 is a thing now

[@thejardz4787]

3 years later, we have DDR4

[@TheGLGAMINGINFO]

So that means I can run Gddr5 video card on core 2 duo Ddr3 right?

[@Godzchildnh3]

I actually was thinking about that. Good clarification.

[@MrReese]

And in 2021 the CPU accesses the gfx card memory via Resizeable BAR...crazy worls.

[@HaydenH]

In newer consoles they use GDDR5 in system ram and vram

[@blackace410]

I already knew this. However, I am glad that you guys did a video about this. Now I have a new tool to use in my arguments with... "less intelligent" all knowing people.

[@NLS87]

Oh! He forgot the main difference: GDDR is dual ported, and DDR is not. Dual ported means that can be written and read at the same time.

[@YatrikShahisAwesome]

This guy's smartwatch game is on point.

[@wowthstscool657]

7 years later we have gddr 6x and ddr 5

[@gilaxia]

this guy is hilarious! There's shiny future in show biz for you

[@theeternal6890]

*Welcome to DDR5.*

[@xaiveworld]

I have GDDR5, Still not sure what it does

[@robertthompson728]

6 years and 1 Day ago exactly to the day!!!

[@JohnPaulBuce]

APU = your ram are belong to us

[@fourbypete]

That could have been 10 seconds long. GDDR is for graphics and designed for graphics related data transfer sometimes faster than DDR which can handle random data transfer mostly slower but still really fast.

[@devilscore2350]

i still dont realy understand the diference.But what i can say that this video explained the deference the best i have ever seen any one do explaining this thing.Owsome.

[@frollard]

As he puts it but doesn't elaborate: The entire framebuffer is the uncompressed screen resolution on your graphics card - and in conjunction with the geometry and textures of say a game lavel, has to fill that buffer tens of dozens per time per second - so it needs huge throughput; system memory doesn't ever need to move those massive gigabits per second, they just need VERY quick access to smaller sections at a time.

[@Yemto]

I have always thought of DDR and GDDR like Java and Javascript, even Ham and Hamster. That they sounded the same, but wasn't.

[@darkrai49874]

So it doesn't have anything to do with Dance Dance Revolution?

[@ghostsd6346]

And we'll have gddr6 available for about 2-3 yrs later

[@yahiaouisenouci7048]

i liked when he said back on track

[@ahhlongg]

So with all that's said . We don't need GDDR5 speed for our computer . Please correct me if I am wrong

[@abram730]

DDR3 also acts like raid 0, data is stored across chips. GDDR5 is a direct path and you need to manage data. If you see PS4 devs turning off things like AF. They probably don't know to put data in pools to slit data.

[@krestcrescent9656]

"That's not even a *taste*ful joke!"

[@Dave-dh7rt]

If "as soon as possible" = ASAP then will "as fast as possible" = AFAP?

[@UltraCyborggaming]

if the cpu has its own memory and the gpu has its own memory, what the heck is that system ram for.

[@dizzydaisy909]

You don't want to use the 16 megabytes of ram on the cpu. That isn't enough ram to run windows.

[@greenaum]

So GDDR has higher bandwidth but worse latency? Is that what you're hinting around? Have you got any numbers for that, because there surely must be some, right? Does GDDR specifically work well for large contiguous chunks of bytes? Are the page sizes different? Is one type better for same-page vs different-page access? By "page" I think I'm talking about an entire RAS row, or however that works, like one is faster if you stick within the same small area of RAM but the other beats it at more spread-out, random reads? Shit, they test databases and hard drives like this I think. You see the question I'm asking? Could you be more specific, cos 4 1/2 minutes might seem quick, but explaining almost nothing doesn't need to take very long. So I'd like more detail on what you sort-of hinted at. Anyone got a good answer?

[@etcollignon]

now I got a video to send all those peasant to

[@327ish]

need this guy as a professor

[@BrimstoneCobra]

The puns, they hurt... linus pls xD, great vid btw

[@aqeelsobratty3905]

2019??

[@gugukhan9949]

@2:52 So basically we CAN use GDDR in CPU ? Even tho it's designed to transfer much larger amounts of Data ? 🤔

[@eb-er9zg]

Question, the new PS4 uses 8 gigs of GDDR5 RAM as their unified RAM so there is no DDR3 there, does that mean it will have problems with CPU related tasks?

[@brovid-19]

now if only they made DGDDR6 and DDDR5, then they'd be cookin with their pants off I'll tell you whut

[@MultiMetalhead86]

Yes thanks for explaining.

[@gigijoseph5508]

Keep pulling like that and fingers fall

[@djake77]

These are awesome keep it up

[@omarz2145]

Dude stuttershock is waay out of my price range. I was thinking about using them for a presentation but 5 images for 50 bucks?

[@626F62]

I did not know about it, I mean I guessed but its nice to be confirmed.

[@Whopcap]

This actually helped, thanks! :)

[@pseven21]

Linus is starting to get a unibrow.

[@Hortifox_the_gardener]

We will never see such a thing as DDR5. It will never be developed. The big memory manufacturer roadmaps did never mention it and the estimated lifespan of DDR4 is so long that it would be ridiculous to replace it with an other ancient DDR memory. If it won't be such a thing as HBM, HMC or NVRAM and such I will eat a broom!

[@bartselen1143]

Mark your words, bro. Mark your words.

[@bartholomewdan]

It's July 2021 and Intel is set to release new CPUs with DDR5 support soon :)