Are video cards with 512MB of RAM really necessary? ATi & NVIDIA certainly seem to think so. The rumors are quickly solidifying into fact that cards from both titans will soon be upon us with mounds of memory that may or may not be useful. Apparently ATi has heard the grumbling, as they've held a presentation over the weekend purporting that even current games will use the entire 512MB with all the eye-candy on. X-bit Labs has the full scoop.

"Techniques like normal map based lighting and bump-mapping techniques have become common place in cutting edge games like Doom III, FarCry and Half-Life 2. These normal maps are typical high resolution and do chew up a lot of memory. Techniques such as 3Dc help alleviate the problem, but I can see games next year [the year 2005, a note from X-bit labs] that will easily overflow 256MB frame-buffer with all the details turned up"