7900gt 256mb or 512 mb?

[bluntside]

So goes online and see a gt version that has onboard 512mb of ram. NOW on my previouse thread i made my decision on purchasing another 7900gt cuz im trying to play oblivion on a native 1600x1200 rezzie. My question to you all, is the 7900gt 512mb version significantly faster that the 7900gt 256mb version? is it worth the price increase?
Second of all, I was told that If you want to run SLI, you MUST have identical cards inside. What if I mixed my 256mb edition GT with a 512mb edition GT, do you think it might work? more ram the better, right?
Any suggestions, comments, recommendations? :twisted:

 

[prozac26]

If clock speeds are same, then the difference is small. VRAM isn't really an issue, since most games don't take advantage of more memory.

 

[skud]

that sli mix would not work and if it did the extra 256meg ram would not show

 

[darkstar782]

That SLi mix WOULD work 100%.

The 512mb card would not use its extra memory however.

Of course, in games where SLi is unsupported and you disable SLi, your single card will have 512.

 

[bluntside]

Very true indeed, so do you think its worth spending the extra money to get a 512mb card?? BTW I thought with new forceware drivers that any game will play using SLI.

 

[bluntside]

So will there be a difference in performance from the 256 vs 512 sice prozac stated that games dont fully utilize the V-RaM.
What do you think?

Even If I just stuck with another 256 hence overall will be 512. Is better to get a total of 1gig or is 512 plenty?

 

[Mousemonkey]

I would assume that the 256mb would be the better choice, seeing as you already have one and if you are going to go Sli then getting a 512mb card is a bit of a waste because you will lose half of its memory straight off the bat.

 

[quantumsheep]

So will there be a difference in performance from the 256 vs 512 sice prozac stated that games dont fully utilize the V-RaM.
What do you think?

Even If I just stuck with another 256 hence overall will be 512. Is better to get a total of 1gig or is 512 plenty?

I do not know a single game that uses over around 300mb in dynamic texture memory at the moment, so having 1gb of graphics RAM would be pretty pointless really.

Just get the 256 and ENJOY!

 

[bluntside]

will do, thanx for all the replies.

 

[pengwin]

actually, if hes gonan game at 1600 x 1200 the extra vram will help

 

[darkstar782]

No it wouldnt, even if he runs in 1000000x1000000 then the textures are the same size.

The difference between 512mb vram and 256mb vram is negligible in most games.

2*256mb in SLi does NOT equal 512mb in a single card, as in most SLi modes texture data has to be replicated on each card.

However, if you are willing to flash the bios, you may find it cheaper to make your 2nd card a 7950GT, which I have actually been seeing for less money than the 7900GT (go figure) in this case the 2nd card would almost certainly have 512mb, but it wouldnt matter.

This would nessesitate using nBiTor to edit the BIOS on one of the cards so that the device ID was the same (Windows would then see them both as 7950GTs or 7900GTs, this would have no effect on the performance of each card)

There are a small number of games that dont support SLi, and some that get a negligible benefit from it, in these games you could possibly get more performance from a single card if that card was otherwise running at the slower speed of the 2nd card, if you see what I mean. For example, a superclocked 7900GT or a 7950GT at 550/1400 would declock to 450/1320 to match a stock 7900GT, there may be some situations where it would play better on its own at its best speed, but these would be rare.