[Big Picture]

Would a Sapphire Radeon 9600 with 256MB of DDR be better than one with 128MB. There is very little price difference now. I have read (not confirmed) that the 256MB cards use an inferior type of DDR and may actually be slower than a 128MB card, is this true?


My applications are TheaterTek and DScaler so which card would be better, 128 or 256MB? I am going to get one or the other

 

[Krynos]

You don't need 256Mb for your application, unless you intend to also play state of the art games, in which case a faster radeon would be what you need anyway.


For video applications 128 is more than enough.


- Rick

 

[llamameat]

There are no games (except maybe the new FarCry demo) that need 256 megs. Even for the next year or so it's only going to be an incremental speed increase (5-6 fps) as oppossed to using 128meg version with doom3, half-life2, etc. I say go with the cheaper model, and by the time you actually need 256megs, you'll want a newer card anyway.

 

[Arnax]

The RAM on the Sapphire 9600XT is actually faster on the 128MB model (325MHz instead of 290MHz on the 256MB)


On the plain 9600 it is exactly the same (200MHz)


That's taken from an xls document available on Sapphire' site.