
Advertisers love numbers because they are a simple and straightforward way to convey the idea of improvement. For example, version 2.0 is always better than version 1.0, a clock speed of three gigahertz simply must be faster than two gigahertz, and four gigabytes of RAM are better than three gigabytes. Rarely will somebody challenge the universally-accepted truth that more is better.

Unfortunately, the real world is a lot more complex than the simple numbers suggest. Sometimes version 2.0 loses the elegant interface that made version 1.0 so compelling. Sometimes 3 GHz clock speeds are slower than 2 GHz if they are based on an inferior architecture. And sometimes, more RAM doesn't make a difference.
Graphics card manufacturers have been exploiting the amount of RAM as a marketing tool since the very beginning. Back in the day, you needed a certain amount of RAM on the graphics card to simply run a resolution like 1024x768. As time went on and 3D accelerators emerged, RAM on the graphics card was employed to store textures and allow for features like anti-aliasing (AA), post-processing, and normal mapping.
The focus of this article isn't to dig into the minutia of where your graphics card RAM is being used. Instead, we're more interested in looking at the tangible impact that different amounts of graphics card RAM will have on your gaming experience. Our goal is to let you know exactly what advantage, if any, you can expect from a graphics card that has more RAM on-board.
Having said that, there are a few important concepts we'll need to cover before this will make any sense, so let's get started.
Also, great article overall. Keep up the good work!
Depends on the resolution and settings just like everything else. but it's a good question, if there's enough interest in this article I'll look into that in the future.
Also, great article overall. Keep up the good work!
Depends on the resolution and settings just like everything else. but it's a good question, if there's enough interest in this article I'll look into that in the future.
We can only look forward to a more intense and visually stunning Crysis 2 as I can only imagine how the story would progress and end up being in space. I can imagine huge asteroids looking as real coming at the player using nvidias 3d vision and utilizing AA in order to make it apparent from a distance.
Think Halo style world but with unrivaled graphics and a more realistic feel with DX11.
Slowly increase the ram from the 500mb point to see where the 512 cuts out. Maxing out all of the sliders to see if the 2GB is ever able to make a win over the 1GB as well as showing the visual difference from the 1GB up to whatever the max is.
I am actually looking forward a 5870 (or nVidia next-gen if it comes in this year) after prices are settled and early drivers are out of the way so I can really see an improvement over my 4870 1gb. This is the kind of article I wanted to see for a while and I give you guys a big heads up for it! It would be nice at a later time to see with the new cards how does 2gb vs 1gb performs when paired in CF/SLI so we can eliminate the card speed factor that we have here, because even if the game would like to use more ram, the card is not fast enough to process the information, when you get two cards, there's more power as for processing but same storage, that would be a great thing to check
And I'm looking forward an eyefinity review with a game running on 3 HD screens or something similar because as of today an HD screens costs about 200$ so buying two or three is expensive but still on the level of "affordable" when a single 30" is more expensive than this...
It's a very nice thing to have. I wish more benchmarks on Tom's had these, since I'm reading to find out what I want to buy. It's great for figuring out if the next card is worth it for that next step up.
It answers the "Yeah, I could use very-high instead of regular-high with this card instead of that, but will I even be able to tell the difference?" question.