Vista - which 9800 is better???

Currently i can get a 9800 real cheap atm, but i dont know whih would be the better card out of the to below. Right now i have an 8800gts 512 that handles my most of my games ok, crysis can get real laggy on the 'high' settings tho.

One has 1024mb ram, the other has 28mhz more on the gpu clock, 246mhz on top of the ram clock & 71.8gb/s.

EVGA | Products 9 Series Family

EVGA | Products 9 Series Family

the 1024mb version is about $20 more expensive, so i would assume that one would be better.

Hey fieseler,

I'd go for the 1Gb one,

28MHz isn't all that much and if you want, you can OC it with the EVGA Precision app to the level of the 512Mb one, You can't get the memory from 512MB to 1024Mb tho, right..

I just got an XFX 9800GTX+ 512Mb for Christmas and I must say I'm luuuvin' it!

Happy New Year

Amplid

The Evga is a great card and as Amplid says the EVGA Precision app is very good, I use it with my Zotac card.

Norm

+1 for the 1GB

Good for running with higher textures. Less HD accessing as the textures are stored in the video ram.

let me see if i got this right

higher Core clock = better geomatry rendering, higher ram clock = better filtering ie antialiasing

more ram = less accessing of the hdd for texture maps.

If i look at it this way, a 9800gtx 512 is much faster than a 9800gt 1gb, so i would have thought the higher clocked one would be better. Its so confusing when you dont have a direct comparison or more info from a review.

argh i hate it when u have to choose between stuff like this

I am looking for a new video card. Seems like the 9800 series is a good buy for the price

Hi fieseler
You might be interested in the following article : -

How much graphics memory do you really need? - The Tech Report - Page 5

An extract :- "Doubling the onboard memory to 1GB may make for interesting marketing, but it doesn't improve performance a lick with the games and resolutions we tested. What's more, a single 8800 GT runs out of steam at 1920x1440—if not at lower resolutions—indicating that higher resolutions that might benefit from additional video memory wouldn't yield playable frame rates with single-card configs. The benefits of 1GB of video memory are also a bust for GeForce 8800 GT SLI configurations, at least at resolutions up to 1920x1440. However, we've seen the 8800 GT 512MB in SLI deliver playable frame rates at 2650x1600 in Quake Wars and Episode 2, so a 1GB SLI config may yield performance benefits there. We've also observed the performance of a 512MB SLI config tank spectacularly in Call of Duty 4 when moving to 2560x1600, suggesting that additional video memory could be of help there, as well.
As for the 256MB variant of the GeForce 8800 GT, well, there's little hope. The 256MB card fared well enough in Quake Wars, but it couldn't keep up at even 1280x1024 in CoD 4 and started to drop off at 1600x1200 in Episode 2. And Crysis? Forget about it.
Given the relatively minor price gap between 256MB and 512MB versions of the GeForce 8800 GT, we see little reason to settle for the 256MB card. You really do need 512MB of memory to make the most of today's games, especially if you want to crank up the eye candy. That said, today's games aren't so demanding that they'll make good use of 1GB of video memory, at least not with the GeForce 8800 GT. Not even Crysis saw a meaningful performance increase with the 1GB cards, suggesting that tomorrow's games may do just fine with 512MB, as well."

I think the conclusion was that although it doesn't do much the additional memory couldn't hurt and it was cheap enough anyway.
Norm

Higher clock speeds over memory size anyday. Same clock speed (between card choice) plus a little extra cost for double the VRAM even better

why not go for the 9800GX2... that way its like having SLI but with only 1 card

The WDDM in Vista lessens the HD access anyway, as it stores a lot of stuff in the system RAM ready for the VRAM, which speeds up games a lot.

An example of this would be comparing a game with AA in XP to Vista. Say you ramp up 4xAA in options, for every 10fps you lost in XP, you'd only lose 1fps in Vista. (In Direct X 9).