Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia (
More info?)
First of One wrote:
> Every couple of years the same questions got asked:
>
> 8 MB or 12 MB? (Voodoo2 era)
> 32 MB or 64 MB? (Geforce2 GTS era)
> 64 MB or 128 MB? (Geforce3 Ti era)
> 128 MB or 256 MB?
>
> In all cases, the extra memory immediately made zero performance
> improvements. Eventually more and more video cards will be equipped
> with 256 MB as standard equipment, because some market ANALyst ran
> some surveys saying that users want 256 MB. 128 MB is good enough for
> now. You can run 1600x1200x32 with 4xFSAA and still have more than 64
> MB left for textures.
Considering that most games are utilizing system memory and paging
files more than video card memory, I'd go with what you can afford.
When AGP3.0 8X cards came out every motherboard manufacturer was
rushing to put out their latest board with AGP 3.0 support.
The truth is, most graphics cards aren't doing the job they could be
doing.
3D animation at an industry production level, such as Industrial Light
and Magic (LucasArts), Pixar, Dreamworks, and SquareSoft is all
produced using a collection of slower systems WITHOUT video cards.
Most rendering at that level is entirely done by the processor, as it
has no need to be displayed on a screen.
Even the Geforce FX 5200 and Radeon 9200 can put out 20 Gigaflops/sec,
whereas the fastest Pentium 4 can pump out nearly a quarter.
No graphical engine, whether it be the Unreal, Quake, Halflife, GeoMod,
etc caches textures entirely into video memory.
And this isn't because they don't have the memory capacity, but simply
because the AGP bus is not being utilized to it's full capability to
deliver the textures fast enough.
Even if developers let the textures sit in system memory cached for the
video memory, it would speed it up, opposed to pulling everything from
the hard drive upon request.
So, go with what you can afford.
Research memory latency as well. If you buy a Geforce FX 5900SE/XT,
it'll have higher memory latency that the 5900 Ultra or standard.
Memory latency plays a large role in overclockability.
With all of the different model numbers out there, ATI and NVIDIA have
made it nearly impossible to buy a decent card.
Just research them, because price doesn't necessarily always yield
performance, as the guys that have flashed their 5900 bios to a 5950
Ultra and achieved better performance have proved.