You feel you need better graphics card for whatever reason and you look around, you see the model with 1GIG or more of Graphics card and without having the full knowledge, 256meg is pointless, 512meg is maybe just enough and 1GIG should get you along while anything else will just be amazing right? I can point you to this article on TomsHardware about how much you really need, but I shall add my own twist.
Graphics Cards & Memory
Back in the day the amount of memory on a graphics card related to how high you could drive the resolution and back then we are talking 1, 2 or 4meg for example but there got to a point when the PC started to be used more for gaming and we have passed the point a long time ago to worry if your graphics card can manage to output even 30” Screen (2560×1600). What started to happen was games stored the frame buffer in the memory (textures) and more memory allowed more eye candy to be placed on the screen.
Misunderstanding’s
Another factor is Speed of memory, these come in many flavours and you would be better off with a 512Meg GDDR3 Card then for example a 1GIG DDR2 Card. More so then this, the size of your monitor, the graphics card you are thinking of (Raw power) and the games you play factor in this. Why worry if it has 1GIG ram on that card if your running a Lower end card and have a small screen (less then 24”) and play not so cutting edge games? All you will be doing there is wasting money on a statistic that you will never use – thats the extra 512Meg ram.
The ‘Average’ User
You don’t game maybe? You have a monitor that is lower then 1920×1200 for example? Unless the card your buying is cheap (and I mean very cheap) then you could save half the money and buy a 512Meg Lower end card. For example, I have a ATI 4670 512MB GDDR3 Super Silent model (no fan – just a very big heatsink) and two 20” monitors (1680×1050) and I do game – most of the games I play I can jump all the way to 1680×1050 with most of the eye candy on and it runs fine. Why did I not get something faster and bigger? Pointless because I would need a new power supply, bigger monitors and better games .
Moral
The moral of this story is do not be taken in by big numbers, if that was true then my P4 3.2Ghz would be faster then my 2.66 Core i7 right?
