I have a problem with red faction 2 it cant deal with the amount of vram my card has
any chance you could ask the guy if he could create a version of his patch for win 7 that makes games think I only have 256 (or 512) mb of vram ?

ps: more vram is better but I wouldn spend money to buy a 7600gt 512mb if I allready had a 256mb 7600gt
I cant imagine you would find a game that would only run on the 512mb card (because agp cards can store textures in ram) but if the game needed more than 256mb of vram the frame rate would be lower on the 256mb card

This forum is for Windows games. Old hardware and its configuration should be asked in Marvin. New stuff ask in Milliways.

I remember reading a material in one of the game magazines on the topic. It was written when GeForce 6x00 was current lineup from nvidia and a strange beast - 6600 512Mb appeared on the market. The tests showed that the card was actually slower than 256Mb 6600s. That was probably because to add more memory you would have to make it a bit slower and, well, bigger is better, but faster is better yet.

I would not bother with 512Mb for cards of that age. Anything that requires 512Mb would benefit from a faster card anyway.

Moved.

games that make use of 512mb of ram didn't start to appear until late 2006/early 2007, and then only a few like Oblivion. Thats why an 8800GTS 320 was considered a good buy for a long time.

yes , its mainly games from 2005 onwards that show any real benefit from 512MB of VRAM , although I think Doom3's "very high" setting benefits quite a bit from 512MB , so there were some exceptions with the very high spec games of 2004.

the Geforce7 series (or rather , games that would really utilize it ) along with the Radeon X1000 , like Oblivion for instance, will certainly benefit from 512MB , although a 7600 isnt the most capable card and would not run those games all that well (negating the extra VRAM).

a higher spec card like the 79000 GTX or X1900 cards would benefit much more from it.

As I see it, more video RAM doesn't make a game run faster. Instead, too little (for the selected values of resolution, AA, textures) video RAM makes a game run slower. Having enough video RAM enables the video card to run the game as fast as it can. More video RAM obviously doesn't help. (Actually the situation is somewhat similar for system RAM. If you don't use heavy applications or heavy multitasking, having 32GB of RAM won't make your system faster.)
So it is possible that a game will run at full potential at 1920*1200 with 256MB video RAM. Now you enable some level of FSAA which will make the same game run slower both because of not enough video RAM (texture swapping or AGP/PCIe texturing) and the GPU and/or memory bandwidth not being faster.
Imagine giving the video card more RAM. Now that factor is gone, but the game will (probably, unless the CPU is the bottleneck) still run slower than with the original settings. The question is, does it run fast enough? If it still doesn't, than there is no point in equipping the video card with more memory for that specific game.
It is also possible that an older game is never limited by video RAM, even at insane resolutions or AA settings, because it only needs very little texture memory.

So, most GPUs have some kind of optimal memory configuration for the games you would typically want to run on them. Less memory will hinder performance, more memory might give better performance for some extreme settings but the game will still run too slow.

I suppose you could still choose lower texture settings to get by with less video RAM.