We saw that most games in medium to high quality settings used far more than 256MB to hold all the texture data, and so the overspill is already happening – you do need 512MB of VRAM to hold all the texture and geometry data in VRAM. The question is, does using system memory for some of this have an impact on performance, and the answer seems to be only in extreme cases where 100MB or larger spills into system memory.
However, always buy a faster card over more memory.
And fear anything like "Turbo Cache" or "Hyper Memory". They generally have very little memory on the board itself and steal your system memory for themselves.
Dr. kitteny berk wrote:And fear anything like "Turbo Cache"
Ha ha, yeah my Dad's PC has one of them, "It's got 256mb memory" he says, "No" I says, "it's got up to 256mb TURBO CACHE memory", "Yeah but..." he says, oh the joy is endless