Bliss 8800GT 1024MB

Is there any benefit from the 1024MB of on-board RAM, beyond coping with high resolutions? eg Like better texture caching.

There doesn't appear to be much of price premium on it.

I'm just started on Age Of Conan and my current card is struggling at 1680x1050.

I only have an E6600 cpu, so I'm not sure I justify a top gfx card anyway.

My interest was whether the extra memory would help out the cpu a little by improving texture caching in video ram.

I saw a review that reported that for one game it improved performance by 50% over the 512MB version. But for most games there aren't such differences and hence that'd be rather chancy.

I'm looking, as usual, for a budget of sub ~£150, and there seems to be a variety of 9600 and 8800 in that range.

8800GTS 512 ftw.