The Video Card- 256 Lifespan

[TK423]

If you were to get a 256mb card in your computer today, how long do you think it would be able to run newer games? Considering it still is the standard, I'd say you should get a good 4 years of being able to keep up with gaming.

 

[lancec2c30]

not even. 256mb is at the very end of its "standard" lifespan. Pretty quick even 512mb cards will be below average.

 

[Waphlez]

I said this in another post before but, when I was running the World in Conflict beta on high settings on my 256MB card it was saying "VRAM overload: 35MB" or a number near that. I say 256 is going to not be able to handle most new mainstream games on max after the next 6 months. 256 stopped being the standard for top end cards ever since the 7800 GTX 512MB came out.

not even. 256mb is at the very end of its "standard" lifespan. Pretty quick even 512mb cards will be below average.

In my opinion 512 will last a while, although since 768MB and 1GB cards are out there developers may give users an option to use very taxing textures and what not (Doom3 did that, when set to Ultra settings it gave a disclaimer saying it might use up to 512MB of VRAM).

 

[Jorsoft]

512mb is the new norm for a high end card and it's not hard to go up to 1gb. Think how good textures that use 1gb of video memory would look!

 

[killians45]

It'll last a while. ****, I still have a 128 card, the most important thing isn't necessarily the memory amount, but architecture as in pipes, clock speed, bus speeds, etc.

 

[jonny_uk]

As above the most important thing IS NOT the amount of ram the card has, 512MB and above is for widescreen monitors 19" and above

 

[Trotter]

256 will keep on working, but newer games may push it pretty hard. i don't see 256 GFX cards vanishing anytime soon, but they may become budget/entry level cards.

 

[TK423]

Off to school in September and getting a laptop, wanted one that can handle gaming. You can get some laptops from ABS that have some gnarely stats for a laptop, but the video cards are mostly 256. To add a 512 to it bumps the price up nearly 500 dollars.

**** the cost of mobile technology.

 

[wolfeyes89]

thats no surprise mobile technology is always behind and its always more expensive. For example an Alienware LAX standard will run u 4k with sli and 4500k without. The SLI can outperform the new 8700M Im not sure about the single maybe it can (i haven't seen the new benchmarks on the 8700M). But that goes without saying that they are nowhere near future proof and the reason being because they aren't DX10 compatible and the price/time of ownership ratio. SO my point is mobile tech does suck. Let me ask you this though, with the myriad of things we have to do on the go today can we live without it? NO, and that is precisely why the manufacturers take advantage of the fact (well that and the higher price and difficulty to produce smaller and less heat oriented components for laptop,etc.) that we are vulnerable to this and not so much as do for their own benefit but sometimes have to hike the price on mobile tech.