Nvidia, anyone?

[Codex]

Originally Posted by AKA_Tenn

ok one thing to keep in mind is that when u use SLI or crossfire, you don't get to use the memory from both cards, just the GPU's.. even if u had 3 512MB videocards in your computer crossfired, u'd still only have 512mb allocatable texture memory...

and weather u choose ATI or nvidia it makes no difference, but look at more than a few reviews and benchmarks for all cards within your price range...

unlike a bad movie, that a review said was good... videocard reviews with solid benchmarking in multiple games/appz (because its not just showing you factory specs for the card, its showing you real world performance) will give you a good idea as to how fast the videocard you want to buy is compared to others in the same price range, so long as you remember, a Pentium 4 with 256MB system ram is not fast enough for a modern videocard... if your going to buy a high end videocard, the rest of your system has to be faster than it to make full use of it. i'd say no less than a core2@3GHz with 4GB system memory (i don't know what the AMD equivalent is) for a HD5850/280GTX (just an example)

Depends on what operating system your using, Vista and Win7 will allocate all memory both System RAM and Graphics card Ram as one pool of memory.

Also to date all games used for benchmarking have found that its the graphics cards that are the limiting factor, from a Phenom II to a Intel extream processor have little or no impact on frame rates in modern games when it comes to playing games at full resolutions of 24" to 30" monitors.