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Old 02-21-2008, 05:53 AM   #1270
drfish
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Join Date: Feb 2002

Location: Zeeland, MI
Posts: 5,351
Originally posted by johnblommers:
RAM is dirt cheap, so why does it matter if a video card uses 512MB of main RAM on a 4GB system if it will hold all of the textures and polygons etc of a complex scene? That sounds like a great feature. On cards with low VRAM the constant loading of textures reduces frame rates. So this feature can improve performance in such cases. And reduce the cost of the card.

What are you really saying?  
Except that pulling from system memory is way slower than using onboard memory. However slow vs not enough can still be better.

BTW, even older AGP cards like the Geforce4 TI series would be awesome for running MA3. All you need is DX8.1 support and they've got it (I don't think Geforce3s did 8.1, just 8). Heck, you could go all the way back to the Radeon 8500 and still be fine (it was out at the same time as the Geforce3). As Morgan said though, the FX 5200 and all the MX anythings are to be avoided as marketing is the only thing that made then better than Geforce2s.
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