This guide is for the hardcore and casual gamer who wants to play games like Counter Strike Source, Half Life 2, Call Of Duty 1 & 2, Battlefield 2 and BF2: Special Forces, Empire at War, LOTR Battle For Middle Earth 1 & 2, Age of Empires 3, World of Warcraft, C&C Generals, EverQuest 2, Lineage, Quake 4, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament, and other demanding games like them.

One of the most misleading factors about graphics card is the amount of memory. Almost all game boxes put this for their minimum requirements, while companies release 256MB and even 512MB versions of their low-end graphics cards, as though they were the flagship chips. " OMG my 512MB Geforce 6200 is going to PWN your puny 256MB X850XT lol. " The amount of memory has jack to do with the performance of the card itself.

While we can safely assume that a card with only 32MB of memory isn't going to have a fast enough GPU (graphics processing unit) to run Doom 3, some graphic cards with 128MB (Intel Extreme Graphics 2) or even 256MB (Geforce FX5200) of graphics memory are going to run the game far poorer than a higher end 128MB graphics card like a 6600GT. In the case of the Intel Extreme 2 and its fellow integrated graphics worthlessness, it will again either run at less than 5 frames per second with everything turned down to minimum, or just refuse to run altogether. I would rather have more capacitors on my graphics card than more memory. I gnore how much memory that graphics card has. Throw the concept of "more graphics memory = better graphics card" out the window. I can't stress this enough.

Even the idea that a graphics card with less memory than the minimum specs for a game won't run it is no longer true. NVIDIA has released graphics cards which contain only 16MB memory, but by borrowing system memory it can run faster than some 128MB cards. The 6200TC is great example of this. It comes with 32MB of memory and can use up to a added 1GB of system memory (which you can allocate in your bios). The original card may only have 32MB of memory, but with Turbocache tech from NVIDIA, the 32MB 6200 now can run as fast as the 5900 series. This seems mind boggling