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To: Petz who wrote (71328)	2/9/2002 10:23:59 PM
From: ptanner	Respond to of 275872

Petz, re: "What's the point of 128M of graphics memory?" Marketing. It will move off the shelf faster. With the recent rise in memory prices the trend may reverse somewhat towards a more rational level that is related to performance. I have only read one article on larger graphics memory and the article noted that often the memory was of no measurable value. A real answer would probably have to do with lots of textures for games - but this is not an area I follow. -PT

To: Petz who wrote (71328)	2/11/2002 12:09:32 AM
From: ptanner	Respond to of 275872

Petz, re: "What's the point of 128M of graphics memory?" Found another article on 128MB graphic memory video cards here (first was at xbitlabs IIRC but not really worth digging up as results were the same: 64MB = 128MB): tomshardware.com The geForce4 cards may make better use of the extra memory but 128MB still seems to primarily be marketing. -PT

To: Petz who wrote (71328)	2/11/2002 12:08:59 PM
From: dale_laroy	Respond to of 275872

>What's the point of 128M of graphics memory?< How about disk cache. Back when I had a system with a 4MB limit on the amount of memory the system board could accommodate, the upgrade from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1 was brutal with regards to its performance hit. I found that decreasing the size of the disk cache from what was optimal for Windows 3.0 resulted in a huge performance increase. At the time I had a 1MB HiColor graphics card that I used primarily in 640x480 256 color mode, which left lots of memory unused on the graphics card. I thought it would be a great idea if some graphics card manufacturer would figure out a way to replace the motherboard memory resident disk cache of Windows 3.x with a graphics card resident hard disk cache. I still think this is a good idea. I have crappy integrated Ati Rage graphics, and only 128MB of system memory. If I could use spare memory on the SiS card as disk cache, I would be tempted to spend the $39 for 128MB of graphics memory rather than buy a 64MB DIMM because I could continue to use the graphics card memory as disk cache after upgrading to a DDR mobo, whereas I could not use the 64MB of SDRAM in a future mobo upgrade.