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X1950XT 256Mb or 512Mb?

5tephen

5tephen

5tephen

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Joined
16 Oct 2003
Posts
1,520
I'm upgrading from my trustworthy x850XT after watching a trailer of Supreme Commander :o
I'm after an x1950xt and would obviously prefer the 512Mb version. The trouble is, these are very scarce - they only exist in a big way for the xt-x which is much more expensive, and any I've seen for the xt are almost the same price.
I'm running 1920x1200 (on a 2407WFP). There's a big drop in price going to the 256Mb version, but would I notice a considerable drop in performance along with this?
 
Even at very high resolutions like yours, the difference between 256MB and 512MB would probably be 6-10% at the most.

If you can afford the 512MB then go for it, if not then don't worry, it will still kick arse.
 
10% is quite a bit :)
I could afford to go for the 512Mb but it's so much more for the same type of that it's just silly and most definitely not worth it. I would be looking at buying a different card at that money. Maybe another £30 on top of the 256Mb model I would consider.
 
Well we all know that :p
Looks like an x1950xt 256Mb then.
If only ye could just buy an additional stick of graphics RAM and plug it in yerself.

*edit - how loud is the x1950xt, I've heard they run a lot cooler than the x1900's. Would the HIS version be much quieter?
 
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For "normal" gaming you wouldn't see any performance difference, unless there is a difference in the RAM interface/speed/latencies... where you'd see a difference is in a game that used 300+ megs of textures without any texture compression and you'd get mad swapping of textures and other 3D data on and off the card.
 
Is it only textures that will use the extra RAM or does AA and AF benefit from it too?
You are right in that I probably won't notice the difference between the two, but what typical game settings would have to be turned down a notch for a card with less memory?
 
Traditionally you'd say the resolution. But in reality you'd drop any of them down to compensate. Dropping the AA would give you the biggest boost probably but you'd do whatever you'd need to up the framerate.

Not worded very well. Sorry.

Oh, and your sig is a tad too big. Four lines of text max. Might want to wip it into shape before a mod comes in. :)
 
Typically it would be textures that take up by far the most space, and would be the main setting to turn up/down...

i.e. 1x 512x512Mb texture without compression would use ~750Kb whereas a 1024x1024 texture would eat 3megs all to itself...

But there is other data that would be uploaded to a card, including 3D vertice data, etc. but this is rarely more than a few megs - tho there are exceptions...

The framebuffer(s) would only be between 4 and 10megs normally...

AA does take some memory but is relative to the size of the framebuffer and only really a consideration on cards below 64megs.
 
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Yeah if your gona spend that much you may as well get the 8800 GTS for £340, but if you don't want to spend that much then you can get the x1950 XTX 512mb from here for less than £300. :)

Btw your sigs too big, only 4x lines of text allowed. ;)
 
Thanks for the explanations.
I've went for a Sapphire x1950xt, how noisy are these and is a 3rd-party cooler worth it?


I just updated my sig a couple of hours ago. And no I'm not going to change it because:
The sig is 5 lines of small text :)
Height-wise, it is still quite a bit smaller than say naffa's sig above.
If I was to take out a line, it would be "Dell Precision M65 laptop" but I can't do that, it's more expensive than the sum of the 4 lines above it :p
So there. Ban me if you like :p
 
The stock coolers aint that loud really, they only spin full speed for about 2 seconds on startup, then settle down to their 2D windows speed which you cant hear, and it hardly picks up while gaming, the one on my x1800 XT don't anyway, and its the same cooler, if it bothers you though you could get the Zalman VF900 cooler for it. :)
 
LoadsaMoney said:
The stock coolers aint that loud really, they only spin full speed for about 2 seconds on startup, then settle down to their 2D windows speed which you cant hear, and it hardly picks up while gaming, the one on my x1800 XT don't anyway, and its the same cooler, if it bothers you though you could get the Zalman VF900 cooler for it. :)
Click to expand...

Thanks LoadsaMoney. I have an Arctic Cooling rev 5 cooler on my X850XT, I didn't even try the stock cooler, but the Arctic Cooler is next to silent and I was impressed by it. But I'll go with the stock cooler this time round.
Even if it did throw out a bit of noise during gaming I wouldn't hear it :)
 
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