PowerColor did something few graphics card makers till trump. It took AMD’s very popular Radeon HD 4850 and quadrupled the memory buffer, going from 512MB to 2GB. Even if there have been some complaints regarding the rather small memory buffer it would seem rather exaggerated to quadruple it. At least with a mainstream GPU like 4850 since it will have a hard time supplying the memory with enough data. But before you dismiss an innovative idea you should look at the review posted over at Guru3D.
They’ve namely tested PowerColor’s new Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards which doesn’t just have more memory, but it is also operating at a lower clock frequency, lowered to 1800MHz from 1980MHz. This contradicts the first information that spoke of even higher frequencies.
As it turns out, the memory frequency matters more than the memory amount. With the games of today it hard to get any real gains with more than 512MB of graphics memory. At least with a mid-range GPU crunching the data.
One of the tests does show a noticeable gain, at 2560×1600 resolution with really aggressive quality settings. PowerColor should be praised for thinking outside the box, but right now it doesn’t seem like we really need more than 1GB at most with mainstream graphics cards.
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