swaaye wrote:I think the advantages to 8MB would be 1) maybe smoother play from less texture memory swapping in some later games 2) higher resolutions. I'm not sure the latter is useful considering the performance level and the former probably won't show up on benchmarks other than a simple large texture test. 😉
Regarding 2): Agreed.
Regarding 1): Depends on what you consider to be later games. Quake II with high quality setting is enough to see a noticeable difference with Voodoo2 with 2 MB vs 4 MB of texture memory, see http://www.fortunecity.com/millennium/celeste … 07/timedemo.htm. But V2200 might be to slow for these setting to be useful anyway.
IMO the biggest advantage to 8 MB is that you are able to switch on triple buffering. 3 screen buffers of 640*480 at 16bpp + one z-buffer at 16bpp is 2,457,600 bytes leaving 1,736,704 for textures, microcode and everything else (whatever that else might be) with a 4MB card. Depending on the game you could use more. But you seem to be aware of this early in this thread:
swaaye wrote:According to the 1998 Gold MiniGL readme, triple buffering is enabled by default. This should negate issues with vsync and framerates. However, triple buffering may be a problem with 4MB cards because an extra screen buffer consumes more video RAM. I have no idea if their older OpenGL drivers have triple buffering support or whether it's on by default if so. This will definitely affect benchmark results because double buffering w/ vsync will lock the framerate near fractions of the refresh rate.
And of course 8MB should make it easier to run 24-bit color. Although I don't remember how big the performance hit was - that would probably be to slow to be usable.
swaaye wrote:I still need to get myself on 8MB card. Considering how rare Verite cards are, I guess they didn't exactly sell well. Aside from the all too common Stealth II, anyway.
I should still have my old card (QDI Legend V2200 8MB AGP) in the basement, if I could only find it (and the time to do something with it...)