256mb ddr3 or 1gb ddr2?

[2Cold Scorpio]

Personally, I'd rather have more onboard memory...but only if the card is fast enough to properly make use of it (like the 8800 GTX and Ultra or the new GTX 280). If its not a real-high-end card, I'd go with less but faster onboard VRAM.

[Athanasios2104]

The more ram you have ON the vga for its own needs, the more free ram you have on the motherboard for the cpu. It's common sense

[2Cold Scorpio]

The more ram you have ON the vga for its own needs, the more free ram you have on the motherboard for the cpu. It's common sense

Yes, but the more VRAM on the video card you have, the less of your regular RAM will be available for use by the OS if you're using a 32-bit OS (due to its inherent memory addressing limitations). Hence why I said its only worth having if you have a powerful enough card that will actually make use of it, particularly if you're using more than 3 GBs of RAM. Of course, in 64-bit operating systems, this is irrelevant.

[kalniel]

The more ram you have ON the vga for its own needs, the more free ram you have on the motherboard for the cpu. It's common sense

Which is unfortunately completely wrong except for the turbo-cache type cards that share RAM

[Hunain]

I would'nt say that is completely wrong kalniel, once the vram on a your card runs out, the textures are called from the Ram and that chugs the game, but yes, the turbo-cache cards say it on the box that they use ram, I really never could make out the difference between a turbo cache one and an ordinary one, since afaik, both share system memory when video memory is done, I might be wrong, so if someone can shed more light on it, would be good.