Video Card Memory Analysis: 256MB vs. 512MB
 

Overall these results give us indications that we are no more than at the beginning of the transition from relying heavily on texture operations to arithmetic operations. We can’t all breathe a sigh of relief that ALU operations will mean we never need see a 1GB GPU, we will. But it does show that memory requirements might slow down and only increase when they are really needed thanks to pixel shaders. The future for video memory seems to be one of efficiency, but for the next few years I think we’ll see memory requirements continue as they always have done.