Sapphire 5850 Toxic 2GB cards bought..

[Hauk]

it's all relative because lots of things will use video RAM and having more RAM will allow you to do these things without taking performance away from your basic geometry and shading work. the main focus is on the dozens of AA and filtering techniques that are naturally becoming automatic with dx11 games, but running something like crysis at 1920 or higher, with AA/AF and a third party's super-duper-ultra high config with maxed draw distance and so forth, you will see the additional memory being used, especially on custom maps that can use several gigs of system RAM. most games don't need 2GB today but there are exceptions.

Hey can you expand on this or give a link? This will be with games made for PC that will fully utilize DX11 and not the slew of ports we're seeing?

 

[alyarb]

i dont mean to imply dx11 introduces a host of brand new postprocessing features, but what came out of dx 10.1 is going to be more widely implemented now that it's ubiquitous. crysis edgeAA is a primitive example but you'll see that it will be increasingly common for games to implement their own proprietary method of heavily de-aliasing the uglier sprites without taking the time to work on an entire 2+ megapixel frame.

dx11 doesn't force this in any way, but titles belonging to this generation will consider it because it's effective and efficient and you've got to keep up with the joneses who are already doing it.