Do I really need more than 1280mb of vram?

I've just ordered some more ram and and an ssd (not arrived yet so it wont be on my system specs) to try and free up my rig a bit but was wondering if I should get a vcard with more vram. All I would use it for would be gaming on a single 1920x1080 monitor.

Some people seem to think I need more vram (2gigs) but I don't know, I think I have enough and any performance drops in games are probably due to it being a bad port?

 

Depends, I didnt saw the need when i used downsampling from 1920x1440 or even 2560x1560 - but here i had to lower AA (gpu to slow)..
For example if you notice 1-2sec lags when you turn around then you're running out of vram (lower AA), sometimes its just bad game engine (Stalker series)..

BF3, Crysis2, AVP2010, any U3E game is ok and all use texture streaming. I think this streaming saves it., it will fill as much as it can then just swap unnecessary stuff.

Bf3 gets stable once it fills whole vram (~1250mb) @ 2xaa 1600x1200, before that it kinda micro stutters, but doesnt lag if you turn around quickly.


I think this GTX570 will be to slow anyway when 1.3gb becomes the norm/minimum vram size

 

yes for many reason:
-texture are getting higher and higher resolution and so need more memory to be decoded
-the normal resolution of today's standard is the ultra super high one of 2 year ago (1080i/p), so the GPU need more mem to keep descent framerate (and faster memory too).

this is why middle segment GPU have high amount of memory, even better than your previous generation high end GPU.

so the verdict:

-2 Go of memory is the new standard of memory and yes it is very usefull at 1080i/p (and upper) in most of the time.

-do you need to update your 570GTX? i would say no (unless for an SLI of 660Ti), it is still a kick ass GPU and is still a fast GPU, it balance with the lower amount of ram so i really don't see any reason for you to change (i use myself 5** series GPU and it is fine).