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Video Card Q: 320MB enough for next year?
Dance Commander
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'll make it very brief. I'm trying to decide between an nVidia 8880GTS with 320MB of ram, and one with 640MB. Other than that they are identical.
I tend to replace my video card every summer, more or less, so I'm mainly wondering if 320MB is enough to avoid being a bottleneck for the next year or so. I run at 1680x1050, and the games I'm most interested in over the next year are BF2142, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, and Assassin's Creed.
Is the 320 MB of ram likely to be a problem for me over the next year?
To put it more succinctly, is the chip going to go obsolete before the amount of ram, or vice versa?
I tend to replace my video card every summer, more or less, so I'm mainly wondering if 320MB is enough to avoid being a bottleneck for the next year or so. I run at 1680x1050, and the games I'm most interested in over the next year are BF2142, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, and Assassin's Creed.
Is the 320 MB of ram likely to be a problem for me over the next year?
To put it more succinctly, is the chip going to go obsolete before the amount of ram, or vice versa?
Dance Commander on
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Also, does it really matter if you're going to be buying a new video card in 12 months?
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Generaly you want to run your LCD monitor in native res.
After 1680 x 1050 resolution (native res for a 22 inch widescreen), the ability for a 320 meg 8800 to render the screen in a single frame buffered pass will be cut down, and you'll notice a sharp drop in frame rates at resolutions above that, especially if you're using AA.
If you have a smaller (less than 23 inch) montior you should be fine with a 320.
As I said, I run at 1680x1050 -- the native resolution of my monitor. Obviously I want to keep doing so!
And it's not so much that I'm guaranteed to be buying a new card in 12 months, although that's kind of the pattern (I get bored over the summer and tend to buy new cases so I have an excuse to redo all the cabling and such). I just don't want to look back at some point and go, gee, if I'd spent the extra 100 bucks I'd be able to run this game, the GPU can handle it there just isn't enough RAM.
Pretty classic consumer fear I guess =P
Also, Unreal Engine 3.0 uses a lot of per-pixel effects so you would be throttled by next gen games long before you started texture swapping from the hd.