is vid card ram more important than system ram?

[poohbear]

hey all,

i'm noticing threads where ppl are saying jumping to 2gb of ram from 1gb has been a huge improvement, would having more video ram negate the need to upgrade to 2gb? or do they deal w/ entirely different things? i.e. video ram deals w/ textures and system ram w/ load times? which is more important when playing @ 1280x1024? thanks 4 any replies.

 

[SunnyD]

They deal with different things. The more system ram you have, the more data an application can load into physical memory and not the swap file on the harddrive, leading to less harddrive access, which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

The more video memory you have, the more space on the video card you have to load higher resolution textures, do things like FSAA, etc.

 

[TheRyuu]

I think the standard for RAM now is 2GB and anyone building a new system should get 2GB of ram.

And anyone getting a new video card should try to shoot for 512mb or greater (in the case of G80 based cards).

I remember a while back that some site did a comparison of vram and how it affected regular ram usage. I think they found that the more vram you had, the less RAM was being taken up. (i think HardOCP did it?)
But, it's always good to have more RAM

 

[poohbear]

thanks for the replies, yea im looking to snatch more sys ram and got a 512mb x1900xt on the way. 4x512mb should be good just ram prices are such a biatch these days.

 

[letdown427]

Obviously more vram is better than less, but a crap card with 512MB of vram is not going to better a faster card with 256.

Vendors target uninformed people who need simple numbers to compare, ahh yes sir, here, this graphics card has 512MB of Video RAM, which allows you to blah blah blah...

Like people who buy a digital camera based solely on number of megapixels. Although megapixels is a better estimate of picture quality than VRAM is of card performance, but I ramble...

 

[Centurin]

You are better off getting 2x1gb Ram sticks than 4x512mb. That way you can still upgrade if you need more.