G50Vt's 9800M Card, 512mb or 1024mb

All the reseller listings for the G50Vt have listed a 512mb 9800 card, but I went on the Asus site and saw that it lists 1024mb (link below). Does anyone know which is right? Maybe the A1 or A2 will have 1024?

Also, what do they mean about "external"?

http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=5&l2=61&l3=781&l4=0&model=2543&modelmenu=2v

 

It doesnt matter. The max the 9800M GS can use is 512 MB. Example, 9800M GS with 512MB of vram will be basically the same performance as one with, say, 5000MB of vram

 

Is that an architectural limit, or just a practical limit (as in no software needs more than 512)? Just curious. I had noticed that the max memory listed on the site below was 1024....

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9800M-GTX.9919.0.html

Still curious about what "external" means...

*correction: noticed that the site was for the GTX, although I still can't find a spec listing for the 9800M GS card...

 

theres a max dedicated vram of 512mb, but if you go to the adapter properties it lists a total of 2000mb+, it says its "sharing" aroung 1500mb of ram with the system memory. Im not quite sure how that affects performance, I don't think it does...

 

I had no idea that Vista 64 bit would limit the amount of usable video ram. I understand that it may not be utilized by current apps, but surely it wouldn't cap the ram. Shared ram is of course, nearly useless with these high-end cards, but wouldn't the hardware memory of them be useful? If not, then why sell such a product? If it can be used, but is not utilized at the current time, then I can see the worth in its presence.

BTW, to the op, its 512MB for the GS.

 

Strange as it seems, I find the guys making the GPUs entirely capable of putting 1GB in there even though the card only uses 512MB -- just because the specs look better. People buy by the specs, it doesn't matter if they need them or (in some cases) even if the computer is actually able to use them (like 4GB with 32bit Vista -- even though there it does make sense since it's easier to put 2x2GB sticks in there).

That being said, I am not familiar with the limitations of usable VRAM on GPUs. The above is just hypothetical.

 

I just got my G50VT-X2 and Checked the NVidia Control Panel. It clearly says 512mb dedicated.

 

The following applied to notebook GPUs as well.

Excerpt:

1GB vs. 512MB on an 8800 GT

The big question was does having 1GB of video RAM really make a difference on a GeForce 8800 GT GPU based video card? We tested this by comparing the Palit GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB to a reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of RAM, both of which had the exact same clock frequencies. What we found was that there basically wasn’t any gameplay differences at all. In only one game did we even detect a slight performance advantage, and that was UT3 in an SLI configuration.

The simple reason is that in some instances the GeForce 8800 GT is just not a fast enough GPU to realize the potential of 1GB of RAM. It doesn’t have the performance needed to push high settings in today’s games that will benefit with 1GB of RAM.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQ0Niw3LCxoZW4=

 

If the above holds, then indeed the card does not benefit from the extra 512MB. Which of course still means that the other 512MB is there purely for marketing purposes.

But this is an entirely different thing from having hardware or firmware limitations that prevent the upper 512MB from being accessed at all... which would be truly deceiving the customer.

 

What I can say for sure is that 512MB is not enough for GTA IV. To play this game with high texture quality you need to have 1GB

 

Only the highest end cards have memory buses capable enough to use more than 512MB of RAM. Anything else is marketing BS.

 

You really don't need that much RAM for the lower notebook resolutions.

Complete waist of money.

Learux