Originally posted by: happy medium
Originally posted by: MrK6
Originally posted by: happy medium
I see theres a gtx 275 -1796 vram comming too. (quick google) .
I see theres a 2gb gtx 285 comming too.
http://hothardware.com/News/Sp...IDIA-GeForce-GTX-GPUs/
They make a 4870 with 2gb ram. Worthless?
http://www.tomshardware.com/ne...-GeForce-GTX,7090.html
Are these cards with extra ram also worthless ?
Worthless? No. Overkill? Yes. I can think of a very few number of consumer applications that would use this much vRAM. You might see a slight increase in some games, but I believe that's more from shoddy memory management in the drivers than from absolute need. By the time you really NEED 2GB on a card, none of those GPUs will really be fast enough to put it to good use.
I assume we are all talking about gaming applications?
We have quad core cpu's running @ 4.3, 8 gigs system ram, running games @ 100fps. overkill?
We love overkill:thumbsup:
I for one would buy a card with twice the memory (if it could utilize it) for an extra 20/30 bucks, especially if I had a big monitor and played the latest games.
I think you're mixing two concepts (or generalizing). If it was only $20-30 to get a 2GB GTX 285 over a GTX 285 1GB, hell, you'd be foolish not to (after all, it'd only be ~10% increase in price). However, it's not, it's ~$100 more for the 2GB version, so ~33% increase in price. You don't see nearly a 33% increase in performance, nevermind 10%, hence why I say it's not worth it.
Overkill is great when it's sensible (generally, cost effective). I bought a Q6600 that runs at 2.4GHz. For a slight voltage boost, I can run it at 3.6GHz, i.e. a 50% overclock that still makes it a kick-ass processor almost two years after release. To me that's the same as buying a GTX 285 and then overclocking the hell out of it as well - you're just making the most out of your hard-earned cash. Buying a 2GB GTX 285 would be akin to getting a Skulltrail setup - yah, it's faster, but seriously?
Also, note that if we restrict the discussion to gaming applications, I think more video RAM becomes less of a necessity. Generally, at least in my experience, games benefit much more from RAM BANDWIDTH rather than capacity (up to a point). Currently, games are developed pretty much for a 512MB budget. Higher resolutions and larger textures will push that, but only seldom would one get to a point where you've overstepped that allocation. Even at that point, insane memory bandwidth (like the GTX 285 has, especially when overclocked) can compensate very well. I'd be most interested in seeing a stock GTX 285 1GB vs. stock GTX 285 2GB vs. overclocked GTX 285 (we're talking 2.8GHz range on the RAM) vs. overclocked GTX 285 2GB in memory intensive games like the Crysises and GTA IV. My guess is that you'll see the gap close between the 1GB and 2GB versions (although overall frames for both will go up).