Performance impact of 512MB memory

Bigger is better?

For most people, everything has to be bigger, better, and faster. This theory applies to practically everything. From super sizing your fries at McDonald’s to opting for a shiny new big-screen TV.

It’s not surprising then that this same bigger is better mentality also applies to computers. We always want bigger hard drives, crave on faster and faster GHz+ processors, and insist on more and more RAM. While many of these upgrades are well worth the money, some of them play on this belief, and just aren’t cost-effective.

We wanted to see where the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB’s performance really came from – did the additional 256MB of memory actually make a difference, or are the board’s enhanced clock speeds more responsible for the board’s added performance?

To answer this question we underclocked our GeForce 7800 GTX board to the same speeds as NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB: 430MHz on the core, 600MHz on the memory. Let’s take a look at the results:

F.E.A.R.

Quake 4

Looking over our first batch of results, it’s hard to make a case for the additional memory found on the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. In fact, the extra memory adds a little bit of latency, actually hampering performance slightly. Fortunately, things did brighten up for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB once we booted up Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 2…