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does 512mb matter on X1800XT's?

x1800xt is not a low-end card ... pretty much an a par with the x1950p, i believe

the performance difference is minimal on most games ... however, as game textures get larger, it seems logical to get the most vRAM if you have a choice [and the price is close]

getting a 256MB would not be a deal-breaker for me ... since i DID have a choice, i got the Sapphire x1950p/512MB version
[$250 😛]
 
I don't think it matters all that much. I think in most cases there is like 2-3% percent difference in performance.
 
It actually improves performance by a reasonable amount on the X1x00 cards, anywhere between 5 and 20 percent depending on the game. They seem to benefit from it a lot more than the 7 series cards did. Behardware had a review showing this, but I can't find it now.
 
i didn't think there was THAT much difference.
:Q

anyway, it is always a good idea to pick up the [higher end] video card with more vRAM ... it also helps when you sell the card* and in each case the higher vRAM version showed its strengths as it neared the end of it's useful life in my rig.

... so, it Worked in every case for me ... Rage Fury32 [way faster than the 16MB ver], Radeon 64 DDR, R8500/128MB [1-3% faster], 9800xt/256 [5-10+% faster than 128MB 9800p] and x850xt ... why mess with a 'trend'?

🙂

*the person you sell the card to is likely not as 'technical' as you and is willing to pay a premium for the "ultimate 512MB version" ... so the "extra" i paid was usually recouped. 😉
[i wish my x850xt has 512MB vRAM --right now] 😛
 
I have a X1800XT. The 512mb is very handy at running uncompressed, MAX textures in games like FEAR and all games based on the D3 engine. Especially with FSAA at high res. It's one of the few cards where I don't don't think the extra memory is wasted.
 
Originally posted by: munky
It depends on the game. Look at this page:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/599-...800-gtx-512-mb-the-new-king-of-3d.html

On average there's a 10% difference, with some games like Quake 4 and FEAR seeing big gains from the 512mb mem.
Click to expand...

that is a big difference

i remember seeing this review ... but somehow the 'nvidia numbers' stuck ... they seemed to benefit *less* from the 'extra' 256MB

i am now even more glad i returned my VisionTek for the Sapphire

🙂

thanks for the link
 
On R5xx hardware there are actually quite some decent benefits from 512MB, not so much for G70/G71 derivatives though.
 
Well, all I know is that with my 7950GT (although this has nothing to do with an X1800XT), it's nice to be able to increase the resolution and only see a 5% decrease (or less) in performance. In Company of Heroes, going from 1024 to 1600 only drops my FPS by 6%. 512mb vRAM makes a difference there for sure. And, with the increases seen in the benchmarks posted above with the X1800XT, you can expect to be happy with the nearly untouched performance at higher resolutions.
 
512MB of vram only matters if you're using high AA levels combined with high resolutions really. (or really high AA levels at medium levels or just really really high resolutions) There aren't really any games out that put that kind of demand on memory just from textures alone. Besides that, pci-e does a decent attempt of keeping performance up provided you don't go too far over 256MB of ram. As long as you're not too far over, you'll just have a slight stutter/framerate drop every now and then as new data is swapped in, though if you go drastically over you'll just get crap performance, and eventually lead to visual errors or the computer crashing.
 
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