Budget Graphics Strike Back: Revenge of the RAM

Final Words

From these numbers, our recommendation for the budget market still stands with NVIDIA's 32MB TurboCache card. The card's performance fluctuates a moderate amount with system RAM speeds and is the performance leader under both fast and slow memory.

In a very interesting scaling test, the NVIDIA cards seemed to come out on top in this round. It appears that ATI's 32MB HyperMemory card is just more sensitive to RAM speeds when all other variables are equal. Because TurboCache seems to rely more heavily on system memory, we had thought to see it suffer more with less bandwidth and higher latency.

In another twist, the 64 MB card really doesn't seem to have any advantage under the games that we tested. Its larger bank of slower local memory doesn't seem to help it stay competitive when paired with slower system memory. This also goes against what we had first assumed would happen.

These cards do benefit from faster memory, and with cheap DDR400 available, there is really no reason to build a system with PC2700 RAM. Of course, if buying from a vendor who bundles 333MHz data rate memory with their system, rest assured that performance won't completely bottom out when it comes to the budget gaming experience.

And it just goes to show, there is no substitute for running the numbers for a given configuration. We can't test them all, but we won't go down without a fight.