antialiasing and anisotropic filtering
basically antialiasing gets rid of the jaggies and anisotropic filtering makes the textures look better.
If you want a more detailed explanation then look them up on wikipedia.org
Also in the majority of games, this GPU will be great for 1280x1024 WITH AA+AF. However, if I was buying a new GPU I don't think I would want to go below 512mb.....and I would probably choose a 512mb card over this as even stalker uses over 320mb of texture memory.