Video Memory

[Elfie]

Just curious, what exactly are the advantages of a 128m vid card as compared to a 64m card? (Oviously there is twice as much ram but does it really help? or is it just candy? )

Elife

[Animal]

its definetly not candy.

in newer games, textures can be HUGE, and all those textures need to be stored in memory, wich is much faster if used right there on the video card.

You can notice up to 50% improvements in Unreal Tournament 2003 if you use large textures, going from 64mb to 128mb. And the visuals are stunning.

For AH however, it doesnt matter. I dont think it takes even 32mb of video memory.

[flakbait]

Yup, as it stands AH is only using about 18 megs of vid mem on my 64 meg card. And that's during a dogfight in the clouds. Right now they could probably crank the texture size in AH up to 800x600, and I'd still have a good 20 megs free. Games like MoH is where you really see a jump in performance. All those extra textures displayed at once mean they have to be loaded first. If you've got 32 megs of video ram, and the video options turned up, your hard drive has to do more work in order to display a new texture. That really slows up your FR. Throw dynamics into the mix (explosions, sparks, tracers, people moving, etc...) and your hard drive will go bonkers trying to load each new texture. Folks with 64 or 128 megs of video memory won't have these problems at higher video settings. Once the texture is loaded, it stays loaded. Until you quit the game or move on to another area/level anyway.




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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
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