The conclusion is that the extra 32 MB will give you more room for future games that will certainly feature larger textures. Right now, you will pretty much gain nothing. But, when the newer games come out and everybody with 32 MB on their video cards is slowed down by texture swapping to/from that slow motherboard SDRAM, you'll still be flying along using only fast video card memory. Texture swapping occurs when the video card memory is not large enough to fit the whole scene. In order to display the scene, the video card has to go to the motherboard system memory for additional storage. The overflowing textures are transferred from the video card to the system memory, and then read back as needed.
The path from the vidoe card to system memory via the AGP bus is a relatively slow data path. The peak transfer rate for AGP 4x system is 1.06 GB/s. This is slow compared to the GeForce 2 GTS's memory bus peak bandwidth of 5.3 GB/s. The use of nVidia’s S3TC texture compression algorithm has been able to compensate for larger textures up till now. This hardware-based algorithm compresses the information to be passed to memory and then expands it as needed. This decreases the amount of information that must be passed to and from the memory, and also decreases the total size of each scene. So all the data can be stored on the faster video card storage. But even with S3TC compression, upcoming games will begin to exceed the capacity of the 32 MB cards. Then you’ll still be OK if you have the extra 32 MB on one of those 64 MB cards.
The trouble with this rationalization is that you’ll probably upgrade anyway for better DirectX 8 support or for one of the other features of the new GeForce3 or some other future video card. If you’re not planning to keep the card until at least early next year, you should probably save the cash and get the 32 MB version. If you think you’ll keep it longer than that, what the hell go for a 64 MB version. It’s really up to you.
