need advice for core 2 upgrade video card

[rodney_ws]

uh, not unless I go to Windows Vista. Most games actually work fine with 512mb. Compared to video and other applications, textures are relatively small and usually reside in gpu memory anyway. I agree dual channel has relatively few performance gains.

You must be playing some old games.

 

[gatoatigrado]

Yes, I agree that 1GB is sufficient. I was just recommending to get 1GB stick initially rather than 2x512GB. okay, I will consider it, however I'm likely to get whatever's on sale at the time.

gatoatigrado: Any NEW video game needs 1GB. I played Diablo II well with 512MB but when I played NWN Hordes of the Underdark, I got a noticable improvement going to a full gig. america's army runs fine with 512mb

my point to your question was proven even if it was minimal. agreed

What do you have against old games? I play FEAR combat (the multiplayer component of FEAR) and America's Army. I got steam multiplayer but I didn't like it. It was extremely annoying when people jumped around with hacks and the sniper rifle and shot perfectly. not the gameplay I was looking for.

And the point isn't how "new" a game is, it's how well it's coded. There are many optimizations developers can make - e.g. Morrowind's gigantic levels took a minimal amount of space compared to Splinter Cell 3. Look at the PlayStation 3 games - those are running with 256mb, and some of them look very nice. The original Xbox could run some fairly decent games (http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2005/271/reviews/917534_20050929_screen030.jpg) with 64 mb of ram. I think you all are running a lot of junky background applications, and falling for the advertising of ram manufacturers.

It only takes 450 mb of ram to store 300 fully mip-mapped 512x512 images. Most video cards use a quick compression algorithm as well, so you could store even more. That's a lot for an average scene.

 

[Anoobis]

I think you meant PlayStation 2 games. Keep in mind consoles don't have a hefty OS to support as well, but I can see where you're coming from.

 

[gatoatigrado]

That's an Xbox screenshot, and the Xbox does have 64mb of ram. There are probably some decent screenshots for the PlayStation 2 as well. I just picked one of the better ones from the Xbox. But I guess you are right, unfortunately consumers have to follow the requirements of the operating system and whatever game they want to play.

 

[Anoobis]

Look at the PlayStation 3 games - those are running with 256mb

That's the comment I was referring to. The Playstation 3 has 512MB of RAM just for the GPU, IIRC.

 

[purdueguy]

I never said I had something against old games. I still play NWN though that's going to change since NWN2 has arrived.

My point is just NEW games need the extra memory. Anyone building a NEW system should get 1GB which is a standard now-a-days. And 2 GB's is just around the corner.

At the moment, comparing G.Skill DDR2 800 memory, the 1GB stick is 10 bucks cheaper than 2x512MB sticks.

Either way, bad time to be buying memory. I bought a gig a year ago for around 80 bucks and now the same memory is $111 after MIR. Almost a 40% increase.

And am I missing something? Why are you talking 512x512? A lot of people play games at 1280x1024 or higher.

If the way I'm doing this is correct 512x512 = 262,144 while 1280x1024 = 1,310,720. This is a 5X increase. Heck some people use 1600x1200 = 1,920,000 which is a 7.32X increase.

Dividing this into your 300 frames for 512x512, gives 60 frames stored at 1280x1024 and only 41 frames stored at 1600x1200.

Anyway, my point of a full gig is for system memory and not for video card memory. 256MB for a video card is currently standard which is under your 450MB example.

 

[Anoobis]

I don't think he was talking about screen resolution. I think he was talking about texture images that were 512x512 pixels in size.