Acceptable levels of Dedicated memory

I was just curious as to whether or not 512 MB of dedicated RAM on a video card would allow a game such as WoW or other MMORPG's to play at max or near max graphics capacity. Thanks!

What resolution you are going to play at is the most important factor as to how much ram is appropriate. Overall what video card the ram is attached to and what system the video card is in are much much more important in determining how well you'll be able to play any game.

Everything in a system is about balance.

If your CPU is really fast, but your graphics card is too slow your CPU won't use all it's available CPU cycles.

This balance applies on the graphics card itself when talking about the Graphics Processing Unit versus the Video RAM. I've seen slower video cards that have 1GB of VRAM. This is a marketing ploy as no game can use the extra memory with a slow GPU. With the extra memory I can buffer more textures say, but if I can't process them fast enough what's the point?

If you look at benchmarks, you generally need a pretty high end system at high resolutions (at least 1920x1200) to justify more than 512MB.

So, yeah 512MB should be plenty of memory for most systems.

You mention WOW and other MMORPGs. You should be aware that World of Warcraft is extemely well coded compared to some other programs so a system that runs it nicely won't necessarily run another game without issues.

As for MMORPGs, I just started playing the now free D&D Online and was very impressed with how it ran on my system. Age of Conan has made great strides but I would still call my system below borderline to play it. I can max out Guild Wars, but I just couldn't get into it. I just started D&D Online but it's starting to appeal to me already.

X2-4800+
HD3870 512MB
4GB DDR

*There are lots of benchmarks you can check out here at Tomshardware for graphics. Many games require the above as a bare minimum and many aren't worth playing with stuttering or lower quality settings. Still, there are enough games around to keep me happy (and Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 will run nicely on this system).