In Crysis it’s a different story, but it’s also a bit confusing. At a reasonably low resolution of 1280 x 1024, the 1GB card is faster than the 512MB both with and without the use of anti-aliasing (AA). When we raised the resolution to 1920 x 1200, the extra speed of the 512MB card pulled it into the lead, but enabling AA gave the crown back to the 1GB card.

Crysis Results

Frame rates in frames per second
Crysis set to Medium Quality
Longer bars are better

It’s hard to come up with some definitive answers from those figures, but it is clear that core and memory speeds are critical to performance while the quantity of memory can deliver a bonus, bit only in exceptionally tough circumstances.

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Verdict

Asus has piled one whole gigabyte of memory on an 8800 GT graphics card which sounds impressive but does it deliver the goods?

Well, faced with the choice of an 8800 GT with 512MB but overclocked, or the same GPU with 1GB of memory, at the same price we’ll plump for the 1GB model. Not because it’s got the extra memory, oh no, but mainly because we dislike the heat produced by the standard GT cooling system.