540M 2 gb or 525M 1 gb?

i was choosing which specs to have on my XPS 15 L502x and i noticed there's a considerable price difference between the 2... so i wondered if it's worth it to get the 540M card. i want it to still be handy in 2 years' time, so i guess i should go for the 540M right?

 

What is the price differences? The 540 is significantly better though.

 

If you're building off the Dell website then try to configure from the different priced packages they offer. Sometimes if you start at the higher priced config you can actually end up cheaper with better specs when you're done.

The 540M isn't significantly better then the 525M... about 10-12% IIRC but the 525M oc's to the 540M speed easily. The 1G/2G VRAM is all marketing and irrelevant. That said, if you can afford it... throw it in. Those 1 or 2 FPS might just come in handy.

 

not true crysis uses over 1.5 gigs of vram in my m11x, games with large amount of textures benefit from more vram so some games use over 1gb and some dont

 

Irrelevant enough

 

what about games in 2 years' time? sorry i'm a bit of a newb about these things, but will there come a time when those 2gb will come in handy? or won't a 2630QM i7 processor be able to make use of more than 1gb ram in the vid card?

 

The CPU isn't the bottleneck for VRAM, the GPU is.

If you want to play current games in 2 years time at reasonable settings I'd lean more towards a laptop with a high end GPU and/or an upgradeable one. More cost up front, but a longer life expectancy... for gaming that is.

 

No matter the situation (beyond stock market multiple screen highend 2d) neither chip will ever use more than 1GB of ram at playable settings.

 

vram is almost irrevalent. see benchmark for 4870 512mb vs 4870 1gb. the difference is minimal even moving from 512mb to 1gb.

on another note 525m can oc to 540 speeds pretty easily but 540m can oc higher lol. if it more than 60 dollars extra for the 540m i wouldnt take it.

 

540m because of the GPU not because of the VRAM. As grimreefer states and links, 1GB is even overkill for the 525m and 540m. It has nothing to do with how much vram a game "uses", it's about how it handles and processes it, which the 525m and 540m are anemic and would do just fine even with 512MB.

 

jesus christ sometimes it's used but usually it isnt like i said before crysis, crysis warhead and also crysis 2 especially with high res textures, will use over 1 gb on the 540m they are the only games i know of im sure there are more but i don't have too many games. but dont tell me im wrong just because you can

 

Yes but they are not going to give playable performance numbers.

 

Even if it's storing all these textures in vRAM that doesn't mean it's really making use of it. And running high res textures playing at 720p is like saying you need 1080p file size to play a 720p video. I'm certain the 540m can't play Crysis at 1080p with ultra settings at any kind of reasonable framerate, hence the high res/ultra textures are a moot point.

My desktop GTX 460 only has 768MB vRAM, yet it is no hindrance to playing Crysis at 1920x1200.

 

See discussion here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...s/611502-because-more-vram-always-better.html