It's sad to see people falling for the more memory = better video card...

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Whipsmack

Gawd
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Oct 17, 2005
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My friend plays a few pc games and isn't anywhere close to be considered hardcore. But it's so scummy how the companies fool people like him into thinking they have a great video card just because it has 256mb of memory and because its PCI-E....

He pretty much refused to even believe it was a bad card and that he could have gotten much better for nearly the same price...

He bought I believe a 7300 GS from best buy for like $80....and he absolutely refused to even listen to me that he could find a 7600 for almost the same price on the internet and how that was is a terrible card...saying that it'll be FINE for what games he plays :(

Sigh, sturborn people.
 
Ok well it just sounds like your friend doens't know whats best for him. Not a bid deal. Most people don't unless they spend three days reading reviews before they buy a new system (if they haven't been following hardware). Vram is more important know then before but pure processing speed/power is still more important than additional ram although ram is finally starting to make a dent in 1600x1200 benchmarks but pure gpu power can easily overcome the 5% difference the additional memory might make.

Anyway, not to sound haughty but I've read this thread or threads just like it too many times before (or maybe its just that I am over thirty).
 
There really does seem to have been an uptick this year in the number of low-end cards with ridiculous VRAM and equally ridiculous prices, though. Seeing bottom-tier cards with 512MB of RAM selling for $150+ really is insane. The tactic is gaining popularity simply because it works. Brick-and-mortar stores attract a lot of technically uninformed buyers who think that more always equals better. Unfortunately, they are also not shy about training their salespeople to take outrageous advantage of this fact. Both the retailer and the manufacturer make nice fat margins, so everybody except the consumer wins.
 
Oh boy, I hear this all time in retail shops. We all die a little bit when someone chimes in w/ "get at least an xxxMB" card. It's the damn system requirement label's fault. :mad: It used to be so simple to explain, hehe. "You need pipes man! Pipes!" But now we got Geo shaders, crikey...when do we get our porn shader?
 
I hate to see nvidia 7300 or ati x1300 cards with 512mb of memory. Those cards probably don't need more then 128.

I could really use 512mb too... but they never even made a 512mb version of my card. (7800gs, the gainward bliss cards don't count)

Oh well... people that refuse to listen and buy a card based only on memory size diserve what they get.
 
Commander Suzdal said:
There really does seem to have been an uptick this year in the number of low-end cards with ridiculous VRAM and equally ridiculous prices, though. Seeing bottom-tier cards with 512MB of RAM selling for $150+ really is insane. The tactic is gaining popularity simply because it works. Brick-and-mortar stores attract a lot of technically uninformed buyers who think that more always equals better. Unfortunately, they are also not shy about training their salespeople to take outrageous advantage of this fact. Both the retailer and the manufacturer make nice fat margins, so everybody except the consumer wins.
Click to expand...

Sad, but true.

Jodiuh said:
Oh boy, I hear this all time in retail shops. We all die a little bit when someone chimes in w/ "get at least an xxxMB" card. It's the damn system requirement label's fault. :mad: It used to be so simple to explain, hehe. "You need pipes man! Pipes!" But now we got Geo shaders, crikey...when do we get our porn shader?
Click to expand...

I agree. Lack of education is the problem here. People still think that memory is the key to speed. The truth is that speed and memory have very little to do with each other.

Yashu said:
I hate to see nvidia 7300 or ati x1300 cards with 512mb of memory. Those cards probably don't need more then 128.

I could really use 512mb too... but they never even made a 512mb version of my card. (7800gs, the gainward bliss cards don't count)

Oh well... people that refuse to listen and buy a card based only on memory size diserve what they get.
Click to expand...

It's sad. None of those cards need 512MB of ram and 256MB is stretching it. The paultry resolutions they are capable of just don't requite that much ram.
 
Tell me about it, my Dad just bought an x1650pro 512 MB for $185. He never listens to my advice. :(
 
this a good thread, hopefully some of the people who are fooled into thinking they have a good video card just cuz it has a whole whopping 256/512mb of ram will take notice. whenever i get to talking to a co-worker about their current gaming rig, all they can tell me is 'i got a 256mb video card', when i ask for more details, they can't give me any. this is a major selling point for local as well as online oem pc manufacturers as well, its a trick that far too many people buy into.
 
i agree, its sad. i've known so many people that judge a video card based on ram only. hell my old roomate thought an ati 9200 was decent because it had 128mb ram (this was about a year ago) but then again he wasn't too bright.
 
That's why I refuse to sell any card other than the "middle range" 1 generation back, card.

Regardless of how it hurts me or my profits, I don't care... I go to school with these people, and I'd feel bad ripping them off (even if they DO destroy the bellcurve for my classes :p)
 
This threat is good for people. They should know these things prior to buying, but many don't. I have been seeing the more memory blitz and I don't like it. The manufactures must be making money on it though, or it wouldn't be there....
 
I would like to understand this more and if anyone know an answer to these questions, this would help a whole lot!

Using nVidia 8800 series graphics card as an example and a 24" 1920x1200 resolution.

We have
a. eVGA 8800GTX w/ 768MB memory
b. eVGA 8800GTS w/ 640MB memory
c. eVGA 8800GTS w/ 320MB memory

From the above, we can see that there's a big difference between B and C is the memory while the GPU remains the same.
What is lost by going from B to C? What can B do that C can't?


And the main question of them all, what is maximum memory size to take FULL advantage of these GPUs?
Ex. To take full advantage of all of the features offered by 8800GTX, all you really need is 512MB of memory and not the propose 768MB of memory.

If there's a chart that describes this info for every current GPU out in the market, this would help us all.

I mean would there be any benefits from running a 8800GTX with 1TB(tera not giga) of memory versus 512MB, 128MB, 64MB, 1MB????, etc...

Thanks!
 
I read that Flight Simulator X does better with more RAM you video card has, because of huge textures it has to load and the landscapes it had to draw.
 
Games don't necessarily need all that memory. The point of having more memory is that when a game actually needs to buffer 500MB of textures, it can. Example of when more memory is beneficial on high-end cards: Doom 3's engine on Ultra uses ~500MB of memory for a level. I ran Doom 3 on Ultra on a 128MB 6800OC. The game stuttered, stuttered, stuttered! The excessive texture swapping caused problems. Now, I run it on 7900GTX SLI w/16xSLIAA and 16xAF (only 1280x1024). It runs great. Why? Because of the greater amount of video RAM.

From what I understand though, 500MB+ textures aren't all that common. Most games are happy with 256MB right now. That will change, but the graphics makers want to stay ahead of the curve AND they know that if someone wants an ultra-high end card, it's nice to put more memory on it than the previous generation (i.e 512MB->768MB or 640MB). In other words, even if you run the latest and greatest, you don't need all that memory! At least not when the card first comes out.

Note that I am ONLY referring to high-end cards here, the X1300 with 512MB will run Doom 3 like crap due to its lack of GPU power.
 
one of the main features i've come to look for in this video card age is memory bandwith and pipes. and i research the hell out of things before i buy.
 
JimmyNeutron said:
I would like to understand this more and if anyone know an answer to these questions, this would help a whole lot!

Using nVidia 8800 series graphics card as an example and a 24" 1920x1200 resolution.

We have
a. eVGA 8800GTX w/ 768MB memory
b. eVGA 8800GTS w/ 640MB memory
c. eVGA 8800GTS w/ 320MB memory

From the above, we can see that there's a big difference between B and C is the memory while the GPU remains the same.
What is lost by going from B to C? What can B do that C can't?


And the main question of them all, what is maximum memory size to take FULL advantage of these GPUs?
Ex. To take full advantage of all of the features offered by 8800GTX, all you really need is 512MB of memory and not the propose 768MB of memory.

If there's a chart that describes this info for every current GPU out in the market, this would help us all.

I mean would there be any benefits from running a 8800GTX with 1TB(tera not giga) of memory versus 512MB, 128MB, 64MB, 1MB????, etc...

Thanks!
Click to expand...

The 8800GTX has 128 streaming processors and the GTS models have 96. The 8800GTX is a more powerful card than the GTS version. Memory alone is not what makes the 8800GTX the better performing card. If anything, I'd say it probably has almost nothing to do with it.

The 320MB version of the 8800GTS is going to perform the same alot of the time as the 640MB version would, but there are times when memory sizes closer to 512MB are benneficial. In such instances, the lack of memory would cause some performance problems.

Even if the 8800GTX supported a terrabyte of ram, there is no application that could use it today. Therefore it wouldn't make sense to put that much memory on a video card today.
 
There are still cases where RAM can make a large difference. Oblivion, for example, could potentially benefit from having more than 512MB of RAM. Hell, if you are using some of the texture replacements with paralax mapping it might even beg of more than 768MB. Of course, nothing exists like that yet so it's unproven. Can't wait to try though. :)
 
JimmyNeutron, High end cards do benefit from more VRAM, but only because they are dealing with larger textures. A low end card could not even use 128MB of textures with out running into frame rate problems. High end cards can use 512+ of textures now days, and you get some stuttering if it has to be loaded back and forth from the system RAM. It doesn't process anything, it just makes things more quickly available to process.
 
I would chimed in on this thread and agreed with many of you had it been two weeks ago. If you're talking about a low-end high video ram card, yeah its beyond most of us to comprehend.

Nevertheless, I just got a 7950gt as a replacement for my 7900gt a week ago, and I can now play BF2142 on 1680x1050 without major lag. The difference for me was night and day. Also, NFS:Carbon runs much smoother, Call of Juarez is a good deal better. Before the 7950gt was added to my machine, I would get similar framerates at higher resolutions, but it would be choppy and lag.

Worth every penny, even though I didn't spend a single one!:D
 
Dethred said:
I would chimed in on this thread and agreed with many of you had it been two weeks ago. If you're talking about a low-end high video ram card, yeah its beyond most of us to comprehend.

Nevertheless, I just got a 7950gt as a replacement for my 7900gt a week ago, and I can now play BF2142 on 1680x1050 without major lag. The difference for me was night and day. Also, NFS:Carbon runs much smoother, Call of Juarez is a good deal better. Before the 7950gt was added to my machine, I would get similar framerates at higher resolutions, but it would be choppy and lag.

Worth every penny, even though I didn't spend a single one!:D
Click to expand...

That's probably not ram that is doing that, but rather the GPU. The 7950GT is more like a 7900GTX than a 7900GT.
 
I never knew that these older cards even had 512MB ram until I went out video card shopping. I saw a x1650 512MB card and I couldn't believe it!
 
clayton006 said:
I never knew that these older cards even had 512MB ram until I went out video card shopping. I saw a x1650 512MB card and I couldn't believe it!
Click to expand...

Oh yeah. There are Geforce FX 5200's being sold today with 256MB of ram on them. The kicker is that the memory bus on those is usually crippled making them peform worse in some instances compared to other models that have less ram.
 
I remember when I got my Voodoo 5 5500 with the 128MB ram. That was slick (or was that 256 I can't remember). But on these cards....? Are they just strapping more ram to them and selling off the old cores?
 
PCMusicGuy said:
Oblivion, for example, could potentially benefit from having more than 512MB of RAM. Hell, if you are using some of the texture replacements with paralax mapping it might even beg of more than 768MB.
Click to expand...
My current record with Oblivion is 1006 MB of texture usage (not including frame buffers and other buffers). One can go higher, of course, but the game is completely unplayable with that kind of load (on my XTX, anyway), and it's not at all a realistic scenario.

On the subject of card marketing and VRAM, how else do we expect these companies to attract the all-important off-the-shelf buyer? Not only does the product need to be portrayed in a manner than consumers can understand, but they must also compete with other products on the same shelf. Many consumers understand the concept of a megabyte, while very few understand the importance of SPs, ALUs, ROPs or memory buses. These terms would be completely wasted on the average consumer.

All things considered, it's not as if consumers are being dicked around. If you buy a sub-par performing card with excessive VRAM, you still have that VRAM for the worst case scenario. It's not as if there are no perks to having an excessive amount of VRAM. It's a little unfortunate that we rarely have the same perk with our high-end babies -- the 8800 GTX's 768 MB doesn't seem excessive at all, especially when considering the next generation of titles. In fact, I'd dare say 768 MB is no longer sufficient for ultra-high-end cards.
 
Dan_D said:
That's probably not ram that is doing that, but rather the GPU. The 7950GT is more like a 7900GTX than a 7900GT.
Click to expand...

wouldn't the extra ram help him out at his current Rez? the 7950GT isnt clocked so much higher then a 7900GT is it?
 
clayton006 said:
I remember when I got my Voodoo 5 5500 with the 128MB ram. That was slick (or was that 256 I can't remember). But on these cards....? Are they just strapping more ram to them and selling off the old cores?
Click to expand...

128MB.
 
It's a marketing ploy, it's the exact same reason we have loads of piss off people who bought 8800's thinking they were Vista ready.

Never underestimate what sales people will do to sell you something, I work with enough sales guys and they will pretty much sell the soul of the person sitting next to them to get a sale.

Fooling a few idiots with Vista ready logos and ploys like 512mb of RAM on cards that dont make good use of it, is really just the tip of the iceberg.
 
PCMusicGuy said:
There are still cases where RAM can make a large difference. Oblivion, for example, could potentially benefit from having more than 512MB of RAM. Hell, if you are using some of the texture replacements with paralax mapping it might even beg of more than 768MB. Of course, nothing exists like that yet so it's unproven. Can't wait to try though. :)
Click to expand...

Theres a 9% difference between the 320 and 640 versions at 1600x1200 HDR in oblivion.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/evga_e-geforce_8800_gts_superclocked_320mb/page8.asp
 
Frame rates really don't tell the whole story with memory, as most anyone could tell you. Often times, stuttering is not well reflected in timedemos or in FRAPs runs, and slowdowns can truly lead to unplayability.

If you read Brent's evaluation of the GTS 320, you'll see that his negative experiences with that card are not solely about frame rates.
 
Thanks everybody! So, it seems the memory on the card is only useful if the video games can take advantage of it.

Given the case, I would expect that the video game system would have some way of checking what video card GPU is being used and what video memory are available to avoid loading too much texture into memory or too little.

Load too much and you can cause an instability. Load too little, and you don't fully utilize the video card.
 
Devil's Advocate:

There are some good reasons to buy a x1300 512MB, including Photoshop, video editing and sometimes multiscreen security camera systems. You don't need 3D performance, you need a ton of ram on the card so you don't wait for redraw on multilayer images on a big screen.

But yes, marketing these cards as good gaming cards is just ludicrous. I don't do it. And it has really become an up hill battle.

Ever get this question, "What's the cheapest card that can run WOW?"

Heh, that one is such a bear to explain. Sure, that 6200 128MB can handle it, sort of. But...
 
Advil said:
Devil's Advocate:

There are some good reasons to buy a x1300 512MB, including Photoshop, video editing and sometimes multiscreen security camera systems. You don't need 3D performance, you need a ton of ram on the card so you don't wait for redraw on multilayer images on a big screen.

But yes, marketing these cards as good gaming cards is just ludicrous. I don't do it. And it has really become an up hill battle.

Ever get this question, "What's the cheapest card that can run WOW?"

Heh, that one is such a bear to explain. Sure, that 6200 128MB can handle it, sort of. But...
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, Photoshop itself relies very little on video memory. Photoshop, is mostly a 2D program.

You do however need a fair amount of ram to use high color depth at ultra high resolutions like 2560x1600. But to say you need 512MB of video memory for Photoshop is rediculous.
 
Well I just bought an over clocked 7950GT with only 256MB off NewEgg, I could have bought the same card with 512MB but not over clocked for only $20 more. I was very tempted, but I passed because like most of you guys I agree that it wouldn't be much more of an advantage to have the extra RAM, I chose instead to have the overclocking.
 
StArGaZeR said:
Well I just bought an over clocked 7950GT with only 256MB off NewEgg, I could have bought the same card with 512MB but not over clocked for only $20 more. I was very tempted, but I passed because like most of you guys I agree that it wouldn't be much more of an advantage to have the extra RAM, I chose instead to have the overclocking.
Click to expand...

I've had plenty of factory overclocked cards and typically I've found them no more capable than standard cards with aftermarket cooling. I would have opted for the 512MB of ram as some games can in fact use that extra memory. You can overclock the 512MB card yourself to surpass the speeds of the factory overclocked card pretty easily.

A 7950GT is essentially the same performance as the 7900GTX which is in fact powerful enough to use that ram as it is capable of higher resolutions such as 1920x1080. Though I'd prefer to use a card like that in conjunction with another in SLI mode for resolutions past 1600x1200.

I'd say for slower cards that aren't going to be able to break 1024x768 in games that the amount of memory the card has doesn't really matter. I'd check to ensure that the data path for the ram is 128bit or whatever is offered instead of the crippled 64bit data path. Also I'd say that if all things are equal more memory is better than less. It's worth it for higher end cards to have more memory and not worth it for lower end cards.
 
Most modern cards can accelerate 2D pretty well.

I would put ATI in front of nvidia as far as 2D goes. I suppose if vista is really truly using the 3D engine to generate your desktop then I would say things are different, however I have reason to beleive that vista uses the same 2D tech to generate it's desktop.

If you have ever installed windowblinds on an XP machine you will see that XP and it's simple 2D desktop engine can be used to generate every single effect that is used in vista's aero engine.
 
Dan_D said:
Believe it or not, Photoshop itself relies very little on video memory.
Click to expand...
Very recently someone told me they were putting together a video editing machine and asked for some recommendations. Typically, I ask what they plan to do w/ it and their size/budget constraints. The first thing out of his mouth was, "I definitely want at least a 512MB video card." Rather than laugh at the chap, I took the opportunity to gently explain the purpose of RAM on a video card. ;)

Chuckle time...

Beauty And The Geek - your task is to switch the processor. :p
 
Whipsmack said:
My friend plays a few pc games and isn't anywhere close to be considered hardcore. But it's so scummy how the companies fool people like him into thinking they have a great video card just because it has 256mb of memory and because its PCI-E....

He pretty much refused to even believe it was a bad card and that he could have gotten much better for nearly the same price...

He bought I believe a 7300 GS from best buy for like $80....and he absolutely refused to even listen to me that he could find a 7600 for almost the same price on the internet and how that was is a terrible card...saying that it'll be FINE for what games he plays :(

Sigh, sturborn people.
Click to expand...

This prick at work and I went round and round about this. He insisted that the 6600 vanilla from Best Buy for like $250 was a better buy than ordering 6800gs or even a 7800gs (he had AGP) from Newegg for the same relative price.

His argument was that it has 256mb of ram versus his dead 9800pro 128mb.... to which I replied that he got the same card basically (performance wise) and could purchased a 12 or 16 pipe card for the same relative price. He just blinked. I was like, "Whatever dude - its your cash."
 
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