On-board memory on video cards has been steadily increasing ever since the first video cards of the early computers that had 128KB of onboard graphics memory. The first modern computer I purchased, a Pentium 120MHz with 8MB of on-board memory and a Trident 9750AGP card had a total of 4MB on-board. Today video cards have 128MB or even 256MB of memory. This allows game developers to develop content with bigger textures, longer levels and reduces texture thrashing in games. On-board graphics card memory has tended to double in quantity every year or two. It is hard to imagine video cards with 1GB of memory onboard, but that may happen within a couple of years.
ATI has been at the top of the heap in the graphics card business for over 2 years with the introduction of the ATI RADEON 9700 Pro. This card had 128MB of memory, was the first to support DirectX 9.0 Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0, had nearly double the performance of the previous generation (the RADEON 8500), and outperformed it's competition of the time, the Ti4600 from NVIDIA by a goodly margin .ATI released their 9800 Pro, the replacement for the 9700 Pro late in 2002. Early 2003 saw the introduction of the first 256MB video cads in the form of the GEFORCE 5800 Ultra and RADEON 9800 Pro 256MB. Games developers have steadily increased the amount of detail found in games. Companies like iD Software have designed their latest games with a setting for 512MB of local frame buffer. ATI recently introduced their X800XL series of cards. Most configurations of X800XL are with 256MB of memory, until the release of the 512MB version I am reviewing here.
