Graphics cards

[kevinday]

I'm a bit short of technical knowledge but seem to remember that there was a simple calculation to see what 'modes' a graphics card will support.

IIRC the calculation is pixels times bits for colour. Therefore a 1600x1200 display using 64 bit colour will need about 120MB on the graphics card.

Given that 1600 x 1200 is the most my monitor can do why would I want to buy a 256MB grahics card rather than a 128MB card. Is there something else in the equation? Does it affect speed or something?

[pdV6]

More memory means more room to store other bits n bobs such as textures and oversampling the images.

[Plotloss]

All graphics cards are capable of pushing 16x12 in true colour. For 2D applications the card is effectively idling as it doesnt need the entire screen pixel map in memory at once.

Basically buy the very best you can afford. Thats the rule of thumb that I follow.

256mb is the biggest unless you SLI most of the current games you will see little difference between 128 and 256 but this will change moving forward.

[kevinday]

Thanks guys.

[RobDickinson]

uh 2d desktop stuff is way old hat.

1600x1200 in 32bit is easy - who uses 64bit?

Rest of the memory on modern cards is for 3d apps, textures, shadow maps,x/y/z coords, frame buffers, antialiasing, antistropic filtering, pixel shader into etc.

There is a point wher a graphics cards abilites mean more memory is pointless, tho theres a new 512mb nvidia 6800gt card setup with SLI, so two 512mb cards + custom watercooling = 1gb of graphics memory :O