Why do they offer more vram if its useless?

Immoral business decisions.

bigger numbers look better on the marketing material

Yes it is this. But you have to consider that most people have no idea what 512,000,000 bytes is.
The person who is going to buy a 1 gig or 2 gig video card only understands some cards have half a gig, a gig, or 2 gig of memory.
And they have always heard more memory is better, so they look for the card with the most memory, in simplistic terms that they can understand.
Memory is cheap, so yeah a manufacturer can increase their profit by adding more memory and charging a premium for it, because some people will by it just because it has more. Have seen it over and over and over again at retail stores.
How many times have I heard a sales person say "We just got this new card in 1 (or 2gig) of memory, it is the fastest thing we have on shelf! You just gotta get this one if you really want a powerful card!) And they actually buy the thing, for about double the cost of the same card with half gig of memory that would do the job perfectly fine.

jitpublisher wrote:

...a cosmetics kit for your breasts. There is something wrong with this kind of marketing.

I wonder if they have this available at Nordstrom's and the like? I'd like to hang at the demo booth.

Well, that's the kind of world we live in...

More VRam for higher Rez , if you paly at 1920x1200 for example you are going to love that VRam. but if your playing at 1680x105 1GB is good enough , and even lower 512MB is fine.

Its called a consumer....oh look this is a cool card and it has 1GB!!!!! thats how much the GTX 260 has OMG it must be as good!.....this card MUST BE FAST !1!1!1111!!11.....

Anyways.....Vram is all good if your packing a decent GPU....but its pointless to an extent....yeah at 19xx/1xxx resolutions having extra vram for added settings is good but not if the card can barely drive these settings....

I can't help wanting to add I noticed in gta IV you can see having more vram allows you to choose better video settings.

You can actually see the amount of vram you'll be needing for particular settings.

Furthermore the price difference between two identical cards except for the amount of vram isn't that big.

Well,

I can't answer that...We should test that to know it.

This is because a lot of stupid mindless brainwashed people will make them tons of profit by gullibly believing that more vram will help

Or conversely is it faster to run uncompressed textures or have the overhead of compression?

It's not an easy thing to check, but it's very dependant on the title and the methods used, and the settings prefered by the user.

Just look at when HL2 was young and the X800XL with the extra memory outperformed the X800Xt and GF6800U in 8XAA scenes because of that, and the GF9600GT is easily more powerful than those 3 cards.

When HL2 was young 256mb vram was a solid amount and 512mb of vram was almost unheard of.

Here's a good analogy to this whole discussion (kindof anyway): Think of a road in a highly populated area. Which would be best a 2 lane (512mb) or a 4 lane (1gb)? The correct answer is 4 lane because it is needed for fitting all the traffic through.
Now think of a road in an area with a very low population. Which would be best a 2 lane (512mb) or a 4 lane (1gb)? The correct answer in this case would be 2 lane because 4 lanes would be completely unnecessary for the tiny amount of traffic and would never be used.

Now back to the real issue. In a modern game could a gpu use a full gig of memory? If you can play at high resolutions like 1920x1080 and above yes. Can a mid-range gpu (Think Radeon HD 4670/Geforce 9600 GSO) play any modern games at high resolutions? Not at acceptable detail levels.

So what is the point in putting 1 or 2 gigs of memory on low to mid range graphics cards? To people that aren't well versed in graphics cards the more memory they can get on the card the better seems like the most logical conclusion.

In retrospect that analogy I just wrote kindof sucks but hopefully it at least makes some sense.

Not a bad analogy, but you miss the point. Not everyone plays modern games, some people buy mid-range cards to play their older CS:S etc games at their highest supported resolution/settings.

For people like that whho cannot afford a higher end card, but still want to play at 8X SSAA, you'll get that cross over where a higher power card with 512MB of memory might get limited whereas a less power core card might be more than sufficient for the game as long as it has space for AA with HDR.

I'm in no way saying this is the common use, or even the best use of someone's money, but there are situations where it won't be useless and may be fine for the application.

Just depends on the app and situation. Same with GPGPU or 3D Workstation situations, not the norm, but would be useful for large data sets.

And as for GPGPU situations such as video transcoding you have to at least have an upper-mid-range gpu to deliver reasonable performance anyway.

3D workstation situations don't count in this discussion since it is about normal commercial gpus that are typically used for gaming.

Judging by your inability to use proper english, I would say you have smoked to much of it.

btw, whats a "pet project"?

And you didn't even pick up on my own mistake, tsk tsk.

most people are still illiterate as far as chipsets are concerned.
so the first thing that catches the attention of these people is the amount of video memory in a card,
most of the shopkeepers in my place dont even know about chipsets , they sell cards based on memory. you ask them,
Me:hey which card?
Shopkeeper:nvidia
Me: ok which nvidia?
Shopkeeper: 512mb, its the best.
Me: no, which chipset?
Shopkeeper: whats that?

so the thing is , if shopkeeper does not know about graphic card then how am i supposed to know.
thats the fact that most of the companies know. thats why they bank upon it.

its all good.

speaking of 2gb gts 250, look at this: http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_ [...] sub_id=284 but its just ddr2 though

It was this one.

Yeah, depeding on what adjustment that may be made possible due to it having more random access graphic memory as opposed to less. Like the storage of graphics produced data in random access memory waiting to be processed by the GPU, for example. Someone was trying to explain to BruceOTB how RAM amount can work in application and how so technically. But, BruceOTB decided to stay on the two lane rode with less traffic because it gave him even less to think about. It's not that a Moderator tried to help him understand how the amount of graphics random access memory might matter, technically. And the disrespect OP showed.

It's the stupid smile tatoo BruceOTB (off track betting?) refuses to get of his face that really speaks to his technical knowledge on this subject.

Why, what did i do? Was i the one being offensive in the first place? ST*U badge you have nothing to do here. Get off ur keyboard and find a life outside, pus*y. Don't deal with other people's problems.

I'm sorry to all the people who wasted their time here by reading nonsense posts, i know my replies were a bit overboard, but i strongly believe that the one who's at fault is the one who provokes.