[light in the attic]

I've deided on the new 20" imac which comes standard with the ATI Radeon X1600 with 128mb of video memory. I'm getting it with education discount and to upgrade the card to 256mb is only about 68 dollars I think. My question is, will I be future proofing the imac at all by getting the upgrade? Will I notice a major difference with video games?

[nagromme]

You WILL make use of the VRAM if you play games, so I say it's worth the price.

Some games you will notice the 256, some not. Some games will need a higher board like the 7600 option on a 24". And then some games will need even more than anything you can get

[stefanicotine]

I'd definitely go with the 256mb. It's well worth it, and for $68 you can't go wrong

[kamina]

I dunno... Maby current heavy games, or future games will make use of the extra ram, but atleast when I was still even remotely intrested in playing (over a year ago) most benchmarks showed a very minor differance between 128 and 256MB.


I would have a look at something like tomshardware vga-charts and see what the situation currently is, and if you find any games that show a big differance you can trust there will be alot more to come. If nothing seems to benefit alot then you might be better off putting the money on something more usefull.

[Tuoder]

The big thing for me is that you can't jsut upgrade it later if you decide that the better card would be better. Maybe you won't see much of a difference now, but, if you ask me, it makes perfect sense to future-proof in this case.