Is 512MB enough VRAM these days?

Depends on your resolution.

My 19' lcd is only 1440x900, which is slighty less than 1280x1024 in terms of pixels, so 512MB is fine for my games.
Now if I was playing on a 45' hdtv at 1080P, or a high end 30' lcd with an insane native resolution, it'd be a different matter.....

 

I'll quote you again...

So a 3850 with 256 megs is faster than 9600 with 256 megs. Yet the same 3850 with 256 megs is slower than a 9600 with 512 megs. When run at more demanding resolutions and settings.

I haven't seen any 256 meg 3870 cards so I can't compare it to a 9600. But they are both Rv670 with only memory size and clock speed being different and you can find lots of 3850's oc'd to 3870 speed. Similar things happen with a 8800 GT with 256/512 megs.

The fact remains that G94/G92/G80 doesn't handle lower than optimal memory sizes nearly as well at the Rv670 does. Even when run at a similar speed to an Rv670.

Once G94/G92/G80 run out of memory, performance takes a nosedive. Rv670 takes a far smaller hit (relative to G92/G80) when running out of memory.

As to

I wasn't talking about GPU's that haven't arrived yet.

Regards,
SB

 

imo it all depends on how fast the card is. the faster the card, the more it will benefit from more ram.

 

512 is should be more than enough now and for the next year, unless you want to enable optional ultra high quality special graphics settings found in some games or are playing with larger than Full HD screen resolution with AA enabled. All the most sold current high end and upper mainstream cards have 512 megabytes of memory (or 512 megabytes accessible for a single GPU in SLI/Crossfile cards), and rumors are telling that 512 megabytes is the standard memory configuration for next generation cards as well. Developers will optimize their games for this memory size.

If a game is released that needs more than 512 megabytes of memory, it's more than likely that it also needs considerably more graphics horsepower than 8800, 9800 or 3870 cards are capable of producing. I highly doubt any sane developer would release a game requiring 1GB of graphics memory any time soon, as currently all the high end cards have only 512 megabytes. The target market for a game like that would be very small.

Both XBox 360 and PS3 are also slowing down the memory size advancement in PC side. PS3 has only 256 megabytes of graphics memory and XBox 360 has 512 total unified memory (usually around half of this being used for graphics). As these console platforms are usually the priority one targets for new games, the memory usage has also been heavily optimized for these limits. On PC you usually crank up the resolution couple of steps, but the extra 256 megabytes (in 512 megabyte cards) is more than enough to handle the increased memory requirements of larger backbuffer and z-buffer. Textures rarely are redone for the PC version.

It could be also that the ATI/XBOX360 DX9 codepath uses ATI1 and ATI2 compressed textures, and the memory footprint is lower compared to the Geforce codepath. However if this issue is seen on all games (especially those not ported from XBOX360), there must be something else explaining this smaller performance hit on ATI cards.

 

I'm not sure why you're attempting to compare the memory-handling capabilities between totally different architectures from separate manufacturers, I don't believe such a comparison can be made with validity.

No one is debating this. Unfortunately, it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

No, but I was, to make a point Point being that video memory size needs to scale with architecture. A 16 ROP/16 TMU chip quite simply doesn't need more than 512MB RAM because it lacks the various fillrates/texturing capabilities to provide enough computational power to run applications at the settings required to increase the video memory utilization beyond 512MB.

 

Bingo. This is the simplified version of my previous post

 

Age of Conan

 

You might want to add a comment because all that really shows is that it can use more than 512MB of ram. I don't think it was ever in doubt that it can be used, but what does it give you?

 

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