Whats the best 128mb video card for the money?

[kyle1745]

Also whats to say they won't patch some current games to take advantage of the extra memory. I'm sure if Unreal II does not support it at first that it will be patched to do so.

Kyle

 

[scoobydooby]

<< Also whats to say they won't patch some current games to take advantage of the extra memory. I'm sure if Unreal II does not support it at first that it will be patched to do so. >>


I doubt it.
Tom wrote a review on this a while back so stop your bickering and read. He says:

<< 128MB are practically useless in current games. It's safe to say that getting a 128MB Ti200 is not worth the extra money. >>

Obviously none of us can predict accurately about the future games. However I think a budget minded gamer would conclude that it's not worth it since we don't know that it'll be useful in the future and plus by the time those games come out we could just pick up a new card anyways.
Scoob

 

[dakata24]

if you're going to get a gainward gf3 ti200 and want the best overclocking possiblity.. id seriously get the 64MB version over the 128MB.. 64MB version comes with 3.8ns memory, while the 128MB version has 4.0ns memory.. check this thread out which states that. i have a gainward gf3 ti200 64MB but personally dont know what exactly mine is since i havent taken the time to remove the ramsinks, but im overclocking quite nicely at 240/550. had it higher for awhile, but it started locking up.. works fine now..

 

[BFG10K]

Vertex buffers are another good one, because AGP 4X is really getting pushed.

Rand, are you reading this? It looks like the nVidia engineer agrees with me about AGP speeds.

128mb of vid ram is UTTERLY USELESS AND A WASTE OF MONEY.

That is completely false as games like RTCW easily chew up 64 MB cards even with texture compression enabled. Also games like Quake3 easily eat up 64 MB cards at 1600 x 1200 x full detail levels and disabled texture compresion. Some levels on Quake3 have over 50 MB worth of uncompressed textures and when you add in a 30 MB double buffer that is required for 1600 x 1200 x 32 x 32 you're using over 80 MB worth of storage space.

 

[LS20]

sheesh, some of you guys run games at a higher resolution than my desktop (1024x7xx)

 

[kyle1745]

Here is the deal all.

I have read the reviews, and looked over all the specs. The thing is I really wanted to get a 4400, or a 4600, but they are just too much money (in my eyes) So I started looking for a different card. The TI 500 are too much for what you get considering that a few of the TI200's will over clock to a TI 500. So I went for the middle as best I could. Granted if the card would have been more I would have done what you all said and just got a 64MB card. BUT, it was only $182 shipped and $30 more than the 64mb card. So my thinking is that with the extra memory it may extend the useful life of this card. YES I KNOW NOTHING USES IT NOW, but whats to say something will not tomorrow? Point was it was a $30 difference. Not that big of a deal. Not a $100-200 difference for a Geforce 4. So the way I see it I saved over $100 on what I was originally looking to get. Not too bad if you ask me. I'm sure someone will say taht I could have saved another $30 but common I spend that on dinner.

Kyle

 

[Sunner]

The only real problem I see with the "future proof" reasoning is that once games show up that actually use 128 MB of memory, do you really think your card is gonna be able to run those games at the detail levels required to eat 128 MB of mem?