NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 Roundup - June 2002

64MB vs. 128MB

By far, the most frequently asked question when the Ti 4200 comes up is "Should I get a 64MB or 128MB card?" Because of the fact that the 64MB cards are cheaper and ship with faster memory this may seem like a difficult decision to make; in reality the question can easily be answered by looking back at what history has taught us.

The first time this was ever really an issue for 3D gamers was with the 3dfx Voodoo2 (back then it was 3Dfx); the Voodoo2 was available with either 8MB of local memory or 12MB. The only difference between the 8MB and 12MB cards back then was price, but it was still significant enough to warrant the discussion. In the end, the 12MB cards made the most sense because as developers use larger textures the added memory definitely came in handy. Just as is the case with your CPU and its system memory, you don't want to be in a situation where your GPU runs out of local memory; the trip down the AGP bus to main memory is a long and slow one.

But with the Ti 4200 the issue is a bit more complex than the ~$20 difference in price between the two boards. While both cards are clocked at the same 250MHz GPU clock, the 64MB cards use faster 250MHz DDR SDRAM while the 128MB cards are stuck with 222MHz memory. The 11% slower memories hurts performance as it reduces memory bandwidth from 8GB/s to 7.1GB/s, which is noticeable at higher resolutions. This brings up a handful of questions that need to be answered:

1) How much does the higher memory clock help performance?
2) Does the extra 64MB of memory on the 128MB cards make a difference today?
3) How do the 64MB & 128MB cards overclock?

Let's start answering some of those questions.