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[Gorath Alpha]

Top-heavy "Big RAM" for noob-attraction only

Whether it really is politically correct or not, I'm not sure that the emotional well-being of Marketing Executive decision makers is worth worrying about, so my usual term for this is the "Big RAM Scam".  It's a gimmick, a trick, and it isn't entirely harmless.  Wasting electricity means wasted fuel used to generate the electricity, which is ecologically bad.  Wasted rare earth minerals is less harmful, perhaps, but the fact is, it's a waste. 

It's particularly bad with regard to the lowest quality video cards.  I'd been advising a member of the Bioware family of gamers on an upgrade to his PC, and he had a Geforce 8400 video card with the totally ridiculious amount of VRAM attached to it of a full Gigabyte.

That is a design with only a 64 bit memory system, last time I checked, which means a max of 128 MBs that it can typically pass onward to a current game, because of the very narrow bandwidth its memory has to be squeezed through.  It is very slow in every regard.  However, the same marketing gimmick also means that most Mainline Game cards are overpopulated as well.

The typical Mainline card has a 128 bit memory system, giving it a 256 MB usuable memory size for most operations.  Many mainline cards do have fast RAM, and relatively high core speeds, so that 512 Mbs will be accessed fairly often, but the most common size these days is a Gigabyte.  Future developments in games may make more use of that extra VRAM, but I'm writing now to say this:

The big RAM numbers appeal to the noobs, but it has almost no real meaning at all  for a card such as that 8400.

The important shopping criteria are core speed, RAM speed, memory bandwidth, and shader unit count (and some cards are running their shader units on a separate, high speed clock of their own, which adds to performance).

When you do have a large display that offers very high screen resolutions, you do need heavyweight VRAM to deal with all of those pixels, but you also need huge memory bandwidth, and very high core speed.  For such display, a High End "n800" and upward card is required (that's Radeons -- you want an "n70" for a Geforce).

Gorath
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