One to to factor that you may not realize is that regardless of how much data you have, it's how fast you can get to it AND how much you can grab at a time.

Here is what I call a simplified example (not accurate, just for illustration purposes)

You have 512 blocks vs. 1024 blocks
You can grab up to 1024 blocks at a time IF they are all the same color
If you want to grab blocks that are different colors you must skip a turn to switch colors
You can grab as many blocks, up to 1024 so long as they are the same color.

Now, given the above can people see how having more memory may not give better performance if there is only say, 340 blocks. And even if there are 1024 blocks, and there are 12 colors you are going to burn at least 12 turns to get all of them.

Memory bandwidth is part of the equation (number of blocks at a time)
Total memory (obviously)
number of different contexts that the memory is used for (there is a difference between say four 1MB textures and one 4 MB texture)
The speed of the processor (how many turns we get a second)

If we burn 12 cycles switching between contexts at 1 cycle per second you can see we piss away 12 seconds.

If we burn 12 but we run twice as fast we only burn 6 seconds.

More memory can also mean more overhead in addressing it depending on how it is allocated.

The tests are marginalized as we do not have a breakdown from the timedemo telling us how many textures were used, what sizes those textures were, how many shaders were active, etc...

I'd love to see:
A histogram of texture sizes
average number of pixel shaders in use
average total volume of ram used
total number of memory Reads\Write

as part of a timedemo summary.... (hint hint ID, Valve, Epic, etc..)

Very disappointing article since it is incomplete (lack 2560x1600 resolution and memory-hungry games).

In 2560x1600, with my 2900 Pro 1 GB, the following games use more than 512 MB :

- Oblivion : QTP3 + 4096x4096 normal maps, AA 0 X, AF 16 X, everything maxed : VRAM=1084 MB

- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, AA 0 X, AF 16 X, everything maxed : VRAM=650 MB

- Stalker, AA in-game, AF 16 X, everything maxed : VRAM=700 MB

- Lock On Flaming Cliffs, AA 0 X, AF 16 X, everything maxed : VRAM=748 MB

- Call of Juarez, AA 0 X, AF 16 X, everything maxed : 560 MB

And in all these games, the performance is good : between 30 and 40 fps.

Could it be the drivers and the GPU itself aren't tuned for this much memory and the manufacturers haven't changed anything else besides the chips?

How much do video ram do I need? Whatever the X3100 can use of my system RAM on my Macbook.

This kind of crazy expensive video card crap is one of many reasons I quite gaming on a PC. I guess I am in good company looking at the sales numbers for 2007.

I think graphics cards need gigabytes of memory and double floating point precision. That will make them perfect for scientific computation.

Damage, Nvidia's graphics cards support CUDA, which means that you can run C programs on them, with certain limitations. Have you thought of exploring how greater amounts of memory affect the performance of custom C programs, specifically ones that are particularly resource intensive?

If you mod out Oblivion with, say, Qarl's Texture Pack 3, it'll use ~700MB texture RAM according to the in-game debug data. You can crank that higher by adding 4096x4096 terrain normal maps and distant landscape LOD textures, too. I'm guessing that having a card with 768MB+ RAM would help there. But really, I think that 512MB is this year's sweet spot. Especially if the new games are all console ports with barely-changed assets.

Whilst I agree that 1GB RAM is all but useless on mainstream graphics cards, the testing methods in this article were also a complete waste of time. The reason why no difference was found between 512MB and 1GB is because you didn't use high enough resolutions! You should have been going up to 2560x1600, and if that wasn't possible then cranking the antialiasing up to 8x or 16x with transparency supersampling. THEN you would have seen a difference.

I don't see why the absence of 2560x1600 testing is such a big deal. This isn't supposed to be a test for super-high-end graphics cards, and I therefore think it's perfectly reasonable to test in a more moderate way. Heck, if such a respected hardware reviewer doesn't even have a 30" monitor, that says something about how many laymen must have one. The only problem is that TR is usually perfectly thorough in its methods, whereas this time it was not.

Would minimum framerates be affected at all by memory size?

When the 8600's came out 512 was overkill for them due to lack of horse power but would 512MB of Vid Ram help 8600 GT "class" cards in any of todays games or are we still just talkin slide shows at resolutions that would make a difference anyway?

I want that t-shirt.

so much AA :(

You wanna see how UT3 does with 1GB of Vram here ya go.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=715&p=2

*News Flash* the outcome matches the conclusion of the TR article =P

I have read some where from one of their developer that UT3 will run better with lots of VRAM. I would of liked if they would of tested that game.

Ogherwise good review.

i'd be interested to see MMO performance numbers for those cards

a busy city/castle/space-port in an mmo may well test gfx memory better than a single player game

I thought the article was good, quite surprised at the whiners. He didn't have a 30' monitor get over it! It doesn't make the article invalid. 1GB on a GT is a waste plain and simple. Nothing else needs to be said.

P.s love the T-shirt.

One thought... I find it a little silly to have the system ram equalling the graphics ram in the test machine. However from what I understand it may not do any good becaues 2 1GB graphics cards would have their memory shadowed in that range anyway.

... Come to think of it maybe that has something to do with the SLI performance issues of 2 1GB Video cards. those two alone would put the "shadow" right at 2gb, to say nothing of your other components.

Unless Vista magically fixed this in 32 bit versions, but I don't think it did.

The only useful thing I can think of for 1GB VRAM are all those re-texture Oblivion mods. But even then I'd think 512 would be fine.

Spoiler on a Yugo, ROFLMAO. I live in the county the makes them, so ROFLMAO X2.

Great article! This is definitely the type of thing I like to see. It's made me realize that my 7800GT is handicapped in more than one way in modern games. Guess it really is time for a replacement *sigh*.

Great article. I think I'd sum it up thusly: 256MB is dead, don't even bother. 1GB is overkill unless you want to run insane resolutions, or tend to hang on to your video card for a long time and want a bit of future-proofing.

Off topic: Does anyone else find it silly that PriceGrabber lists both TigerDirect and "all-new CompUSA.com"? The CompUSA name is now owned by TigerDirect, and it seems like TigerDirect.com and CompUSA.com prices are always identical. It wouldn't surprise me if the product even ships from the same warehouses. Seems rather redundant to me. (And yes, I understand TR probably doesn't have control over the vendors PriceGrabber displays, but I thought I'd point it out anyway for those who didn't get the memo about TigerDirect acquiring the rights to the CompUSA name.)

It's obvious.

Radeon HD is better. :P

Where can you get that t-shirt?

One GB of vram seems to work well for the ATI 3870 X2 :)

Just a nitpick, but the graphs are 513 px wide, and have img tags squeezing them to 512. The text went a bit fuzzy in my browser.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that when framerates start dropping due to a lack of video ram it's not a nice experience. The average framerate may look decent enough to be playable but is usually accompanied by annoying amounts of hitching and stuttering as memory gets paged in and out of the cards memory.

The fact of the matter is that current games are designed with 512mb cards in mind, making more than that generally a waste. As the amount of onboard memory rises, the impact of resolution on memory usage becomes less of issue as the framebuffer takes up a lower percentage of total ram.

jeebus, in an examination of video card memory sizes, you didn't benchmark 2560 x 1600.

you guys tested the 9600 at that resolution, yet it seems way more obvious of a test for this article

It's the same-ol same-ol... by the time video cards really do need a gig of RAM for mainstream, these video cards won't be powerful enough for the games anyway. Not quite as bad as the 256MB Geforce FX5200's (cards that were worthless no matter how much memory you put on them), but still in that vein. The t-shirt says it all, nothing but e-peen points and easy sales to fools who can't understand that more simply does not always equal better.

While the source engine is fine and has some good games under its belt, it's also a relatively pansy engine compared to others out there, notably oblivion's which went MIA from the reviews. With every setting manually dialed up (not with the "ultra high" preset), its still a very hungry game, even if the shadows can look weird at times :P.

Edit: looking back at the reviews I don't think those two games were compared head to head, so I'm probably off since every HL expansion has some improvements over the previous version.

Nice and quick review.
It has been said more then once, so I hope people are listening.
No reason to pay for the extra ram of the the GPU doesnt have enough horsepower to use it.

Interesting that a SLI setup does make the ram actually useful.

P.S. Nice shirt; one only a geek could love.