PCA Forums

I'm looking to upgrade my 32mb radeon to a 64mb one. will I notice much of a differance?

thanks in advance

Bio, I would say if money is no object, definitly go with the 64 meg version. And not just because it is a higher number ; but because in high texture game scenes with texture compression turned off (for maximum image quality) you want to have as much texture memory as possible. On a voodoo5 5500 card, it has 2 32 meg tmu's but each work in parellel. This in effect means the card has a higher number than 32 megs of ram for texturing, but a lower number than it's advertised 64 megs due to the chipset's eating it. Geforce2 GTS and Radeon card's on the other hand when they have a 64 meg card, all 64 meg's are for texture's and it definitly does work and help from my testing. It made Quake3 and Unreal Tournament much better ; especially quake3 when s3tc was turned off. Less stuttering, and about a 5 fps addition. Overall for the future, it is even more worth it. Games like Giants and Alice use mondo amounts of ram and texture memory, so the more the better. Future games like Return to Wolfenstein and Doom III are most certainly going to stress even the fastest ghz box with a 64 meg card, so definitly get the fastest you are able too.

I do lots of cad and 3dstudio max type of stuff on this system (big rendering goes to the dual PIII system) when I have to do it on the fly. So 64mb would also be good for that right?

Since I'm not a cad man (never used it) I cannot vouch for that per se. But I can tell you if you strictly do cad work, or decide too, a 3dlabs Permedia 3 Create card would actually run faster than even a Geforce2 GTS Ultra card in cad programs. This is because the 3dlabs card is fine tuned for work apps and not games, with it's virtual texture managment. But I can tell you from what Ive read, it will definitly help, even in cad. But for mondo cad performance only, the 3dlabs permedia 3 create is the way to go. For an overall winner of image quality, a stable ICD which is VERY important, and fast performance, stick with the radeon.