At what point, clockspeed wise would the 8600M GT DDR2 use all of its 512mb at 1450x1050?

The reason I ask is that I have currently got one of these cards. When I game I clock the CPU to 3.15ghz (stock 2.4) and the GPU to 575/1400/543 (stock 475/950/400). At these clocks the system scores 5000 3dmark06 points.

At these clocks the card is rock stable and after hours playing crysis warhead only hits 74C.

What amazes me is that I can play the game pretty fluidly in most levels at 1480x1080 (native 1680x1080) with everything on enthusiast except for shaders which I leave at gamer and shadows on minimum.

Does this mean therefore that at the relatively fast DDR2 OC of 543 finally the card can put all 512mb to good use? I will be getting a DDR3 8600M GT next week to replace the DDR2 free of charge as the repair centre mistakenly put this one in when they repaired it lol so I can compare the two in performance at higher resolutions.

What are peoples thoughts on the matter, can a mid-range card with gimick amounts of DDR2 memory use most of it if they can OC well or not?

 

has nothing to do with the speed of the card, just how the program (game) utilizes the card.

higher resolutions tend to use more memory than anything storing more texture data and things in the ram.

 

Is 1480x1080 (1050?) some sort of weird custom resolution?

The answer to your question: It won't become fast enough to read the stored data, no matter what.

 

It's not a case of all, its if it uses a bit over 256mb. In a few situations it might.

 

No. 1450 is a 4:3 version of 1680 x 1050, I imagine.

 

depends on the game, gta4 will fill up your graphics memory no matter what.

 

lol whoops couple of typos, I meant to say 1400x1050 (native 1680x1050)

so it seems a little bit inconclusive. Basically it probably does but only in very rare situations?

 

It depends entirely on the game. At 1400x1050, you probably won't end up using more than 512MB of graphics memory in any game. But it's right at the edge.

 

You can test it yourself with Rivatuner.

 

some games have commands you can type in a console that display mem usage... like Oblivion

 

How can you know? What if the game has 500 MB of texture data? Doom 3 at ultra high would eat this memory even at 640x480, if what they say about texture sizes is true.

 

If doom 3 would eat it at ultra high then I guess Crysis warhead would have even larger textures sizes no?

Will be interesting to see how well the 8600M GT DDR3 OCed will deal with the same game and settings. Although memory is faster will only have half the memory size. Looking forward to testing

 

Then wouldn't that mean that Crysis has a lot more than even that?

 

This article by Tom's Hardware test this exact question albeit with a much faster gpu. They found that until 1920x1200 the 4870 was never really short of memory and that was only at the absolute highest settings or ing GTA4 where they manually set the memory usage to 1gb. I have no doubt that your card will not run any game fluidly at high enough settings for it to use more than 512mb so memory should not be an issue.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-ram-4870,2428.html