Now, is there anything out there (read: games) that uses 128mb of video ram efficeintly and actually requires half a gig of ram to be loaded on the video card?

Currently shipping? ha! Ton's of people are still in back order status that ordered the X800XT's back in early june.

Doom 3 Video Card Requirements :

Ultra Quality (max. quality): for 512MB video cards. Each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression.

High Quality: for 256MB video cards. Uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss.

Medium Quality: for 128MB video cards. Uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges.

Low Quality: for 64MB video cards. It does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well.

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i guess we won't even see a card that supports the ultra settings for atleast a few months, or maybe they are rushed now when a game that will actually use it is going to be out very soon :-)

But i think ill keep my 256mb fx5900 Ultra until NV50 comes out.