Maxit Mag

 

One of the most widely used weapons to "trick" graphics cards buyers has been, almost from the inception of 3D accelerators, to bloat them with memory. As soon as it became cheaper to double the amount of on-board RAM, rather than getting a better GPU, the market was flooded with this kind of nonsense products.

To avoid such manufacturer's traps, the best method has always been to read reviews that give you the information needed for each specific graphics card and the right amount of memory it should carry to function propertly. Another posibility, for several years now, was to automatically discard 512MB+ configurations for anything else than the "ultra" (or, more recently, GTX) models. It didn't take much effort to figure out that the 9200 SE only needed so much, but where do we trace the line?

Right now general rules are difficult to stick with. For example, a Radeon HD 3850 may do reasonably well with 256MB, but another card from almost the same category like the 8800 GT goes down hard if we cripple it by halving it's memory. The XFX 8800 GT 256MB Alpha Dog Edition, with (more or less) the same characteristics as a 8800 GT 512MB, only gets good framerates under UT3. If you play any other game, you will be left in the dust. With the next generation of games appearing on the shelves, 512mb is really the default minimum you should consider for those high res polygons.

Link: PC Perspective.