I would like to ask someone who might have the experience of use or I.T. experience in the comparison of for example, two identical video cards, with the ONLY difference in the amount of their on board memory 256 MB vs 512 MBIn FS9 and/or FSX 'real world usage', not white paper---is there a really TRUE difference in the performance of the higher on board memory card?If you would answer yes to that, in WHAT WAY, is that added performance seen via FS9 or FSX?I can't really find much on this subject over the Net as pertains to flight simulation usage of the card(s).Your opinions and experiences would be most welcome!Thanks,Mitch

Good one Mitch! As you can imagine, I'll be interested in any substantive replys as well, having just oredered the 512MB edition. Btw thanks for the power supply affirmation on the other thread!Bruce

Although I cannot quantitatively say because I have not directly compared two video cards where memory size was the only difference, I can quite confidently say that in FS9 it would make absolutely no difference as not only is that title almost completely CPU-bound in low FPS situations, I have also never seen video memory consumption go above 200MB even with all sliders right, max AA/AF and resolutions as high as 3360x1050.FSX is a little more demanding on GPU than FS9, but not much. With settings up high however, memory usage can quite easily tip over the 256M usage barrier at 1680x1050. On my system, I can use up to 610MB video memory if I run FSX maxed, spanned at 3360x1050 and google earth tracking in the background, but this is quite an extreme load compared to what the average joe will load their system up with. When nearing the memory limit of my system, texture loading does noticably slow down, although once loaded there is neglible FPS impact.Gary

Thank you very much for your input, Gary. Being that I am staying with FS9 for quite some time (keeping my Gen 3 for the long run), this post was very informative.I had no idea that the system wouldn't make full use of whatever the graphics card memory buffer had available.200 MB huh? FS9 full bore? OK, I am then comfortably covered with my 256 MB part. Information good to lock down.Thanks again!Mitch

You're welcome, Bruce. You have no worries regarding your up-and-coming vid card. Enjoy!Mitch

Being that I fly FSX (mostly) at 1600x1200 it looks like the 512MB will be a good choice for me!Thanks, gents!!Bruce

...I can add that early in the days of FSX I asked Phil Taylor or tdragger or one of the ACES members the following question:"How much video memory does FSX use?"The response was:"All that you have."He also said, "It's better to have a slower video card with lots of video memory, than a faster video card with a smaller amount of video memory."RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

>>"How much video memory does FSX use?">>The response was:>>"All that you have.">>He also said, "It's better to have a slower video card with>lots of video memory, than a faster video card with a smaller>amount of video memory.">That's not my experience. I have a 512MB 7900GS and RivaTuner rarely reports more than 256MB used.George

Hi everybody, As already stated, the performance difference tends to be 0. Parallely, we shouldn't forget the Global Texture Quality(GTQ) slider. Maybe that's why you're seeing different values, George? A max setting sends 1024x textures, 1 notch from max are 512x textures etc. And they use GPU-memory accordingly. FS9 @ max texture sizes leads to <200MB on my end. Most I've seen was ca 185MB. As Rhett indicated, FSX @ 1024x textures uses a lot more. A lot! :-) Hence, if somebody is looking for decent FSX perf with a 256MB GPU, the best 'tweak' is to reduce texture sizes via GTQ and monitor it. A great utility to monitor RAM-consumption is MemStatus. http://nuclearplayground.com/NuclearPlayground/If, let it run in the background for an entire session and it will tell you whether you were within or beyond certain boundaries. FWIW, I'll attach a MemStatus screenshot of a machine running XP64/4GB & FSX with a 512MB GPU @ medium to high settings. NY, Rhett! :-) Please don't ask me why the GPU reserves an extra 1GB of system mem! No idea... :-) Hope this adds to thoughts, kind regards Jaap Edit, forgot the screenie

As stated in this thread http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...88&page=2#28388going from 256 to 512 (640 in my case) smoothed the ride considerably. Frame rates were much more consistent and I upped my AA settings. The CPU will most likely still be a bottleneck to many more FPS.