256MB or 512MB Graphic card on Dell Studio

Hi,

I don't play games too often. But I do watch videos & movies & sometimes work on photoshop or GIMP. So will 512MB graphic card make a huge difference compared to 256MB graphic card in my case?

 

Different amount of video ram on the same card will not affect you at all.
What are the video card models?

 

I think u are talking about the new Studio 1555 which has ATI HD 4570 ....

The integrated card 4500MHD should handle movies ,videos easily....

But for photoshop and other stuff included , 256 mb one will be pretty good
If u are from india ,Then Dell has featured system of P8600 ,256 MB ATI 4570 for 49900 INR and one with T6400 , 4500MHD for 43900 INR...The difference is just 6K ...
P8600 , 256 HD 4570 one should be prefect for u..I dont think u need to go for 512 mb card ...

 

You dont need the 512MB card for photoshop, nor for games really - the card itself will be a bottleneck before the amount of Video RAM is.

 

I am talking about Dell Studio that akh1989 is talking about (with P8600).

 

I think u are talking about the new Studio 1555 which has ATI HD 4570 ....
Lol we have CLASS 2 Card!

3450 and 3470 are CLASS 3!

 

I hope dell lets us upgrade over 3450 to the new one.

 

From what I've read and learned even if your card has 512MB of graphics ram a 128-bit card will only be able to address or use 256MB of the RAM.

You would need a 256-bit or 512-bit graphics card to use all the 512MB of graphics RAM.

Dell Studio 15 ATI 3450 is 64-bit (thats why its so bad)
and the Dell Studio 17 ATI 3650 is 128-bit (ok for light gaming)

DELL keep the 256-bit cards for the XPS Lines

and the 512-bit card for the Premium Gaming ALIENWARE line.


So its really irrelevant and useless to get 512MB of Graphics RAM if your system can't use it anyways.


And most importantly look for DDR3 RAM for Gaming. the new DELL Studio XPS 16 should be nice it uses DDR3 RAM and DDR3 Graphics RAM

studio systems only use DDR2

 

Dear god no. Who in the world told you this?

The width of the bus is completely unrelated to the address space. The width of the bus simply means that, for a given clockrate, you have more bandwidth available. Think of it like a highway. Clockspeed is how fast the cars are going. Bus width is the number of lanes. So a 256-bit bus has 256 lanes all transferring data simultaneously.

The address space issue is completely different. I'll try to explain it in layman's terms without introducing too much technical stuff. Computers use numbers to "address" or "index" memory. A program tells a CPU to read memory at location [x], and the CPU will go ahead and read whatever was in byte [x]. CPUs can only deal with specific sizes of numbers. A 32-bit CPU can only deal with 32-bit numbers at most, and a 64-bit CPU can only deal with 64-bit numbers at most (I'm vastly oversimplifying here, but bear with me). Now, the largest number you can fit into 32-bits is 2^32-1, or 4,294,967,295.

Since that's the largest number a 32-bit CPU can handle, a program can only ask it to access memory locations up to that number. If a piece of memory sits at location 5,000,000,000 (the 5 billionth byte), then the program has no way of telling the CPU how to get that memory since the CPU doesn't understand numbers that big. The biggest number a 32-bit CPU understands is 4,294,967,295.

So on a 32-bit system, you can only address a maximum of 4GB. But some of that address space is taken up by the video memory. Let's say a program wants to write to video memory rather than system memory. How does it tell that to the CPU? The way it works is this: for example let's say you have 512MB of video memory. The CPU says, "all numbers from 0 to 512 million will access the video memory. All numbers from 512 million to 4 billion will access the system memory." So if a program wants to write to video memory, it gives the CPU a number between 0 and 512 million. And the CPU will access video memory. If the program wants to access system memory, it gives the CPU a number between 512 million and 4 billion.

But what happens when the program wants to access the system memory between locations 0 and 512 million? It can't, because the CPU has said that those numbers refer to video memory now, rather than system memory. So those bytes in system memory between 0 and 512 million will be completely inaccessible. This is where the 3-3.5GB limit in 32-bit operating systems come from.

If you still aren't convinced (or just don't understand), I leave you with this factoid: all system memory (that is, DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 RAM) have a 64-bit wide bus. That had absolutely nothing to do with the address space limitations in 32-bit OS's.

 

I'm giving you rep for that. like how long did it take to write that up..

What Ice Cold probably read is that such a large amount of video ram is simply not useful in a slower graphics card which would not be able to take advantage of it, but misunderstood why.

 

i think people are too hyped up about this 512mb to 1gb (simply just looking at memory). When they really should look at the graphics card it self. I mean an nvdia 9300m g with 50000000gb's (sarcasm) would get stomped by an old 6600gt with 128mb just because of the fact that is has twice the memory interface 128 bit. also remember the memory used. gddr3 is way faster than ddr2.