The tracer smoke dissipates, not sure how much of the memory stuff will remain but some of it is being used just for beta. This graphics card has 128MB and looks like it's using 108 of that 128MB.
More eye candy, the more vidmem used. Of course we have the option to turn off some of that eye candy.
There are a lot of folks using 64MB cards and getting continuosly improving frame rates as they fine tune the code.