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Video Memory for Games

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Grandcheapskate

Veteran Member
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Oct 9, 2014
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New Jersey, USA
Hi Guys,
Just as a generalization for gaming, what would you say is a good baseline for the amount of video memory needed for:

1. DOS games
2. Win 95 games
3. Win 98 games
4. Win XP games

Obviously more is better but I am guessing after a certain point additional memory does not add any benefit.

Thanks...Joe
 
Your question is question is a bit more tricky than just saying what is the memory needed to run games on those OS versions. Basically, you should be looking at what hardware you want to run those OS on. For example, I had a Toshiba laptop at one time, that ran Windows 98. And while some computers could use 64 MB on Win98 for games just fine, this laptop maxed on the pentium class system at 40 MB. You also have caching issues to deal with.

If you are asking, "what is the most you could ever need to run any game of that era?", that is also tricky. Win95 was still being used to run new DOS game releases, but also highly overlaps with Win98, in that compatibility of games between both is almost identical. Again, it really depends on the hardware you want to run more than OS. And Win95/Win98 kind of cuts into WinXP era too, as games were made could run pretty much ran on all of it. (I ran Win95 until around WinXP was released, it was pretty evident HW is key)

I'm unsure if you mean baseline as, "all you need to get by?", I think minimum is obvious on the OS box and game box. But as for a maximum memory for games that you'd likely never go past (again truly based on hardware if this makes any sense), I'd say this:

DOS - 8MB (you could build bigger DOS systems, but compatibility issues with later hardware and DOS games can be an issue for you)
Win95/98 - 256MB (the high end amount...exact amount possible varies more -- might need to install patches -- running win95 is not much point if you can run win98 )
WinXP - 2GB (pretty much up to the limits of 32-bit systems, but higher options are around, if not really needed)

Then again, you can try building a system that covers alot of games, but depending on the game, playing it on too new of hardware might not satisfy you.
 
Joe,

I'm building another XP 32-bit gamer as I write. This one's got a 1 GB PCIe video card and 4 GB on the main board, of which XP 32 only sees about 3.5 GB (4 GB max on XP 32-bit but could squeeze more if you went with the server setup). Lots of theory's out there about memory allocation and uses. I more or less do what I feel like at the time.

Tom
 
Another post addressed (hah!) system memory, but as I interpretted the question to be about memory on the video card itself I would answer thusly:

DOS - 512KB gives you enough for 640x480x8bit for eg. Warcraft II. Only a few games would (optionally) use more than that
Win95 - 1MB for 2D games, or perhaps 8MB for early 3D games
Win98 - up to 128MB for early Direct3D 9 games
WinXP - 512MB should be enough for most, a few games might benefit from 1GB
 
Agent Orange said:
They kind of go hand in hand in my way of thinking.
Click to expand...

I could have definitely worded my question better. I know I could look at every game I have (which would take a VERY long time) to see the video card requirements, but my point in asking the question was basically: If I see a video card with 8mb, what era would that be from? Same for cards with 32mb, 64mb, 128mb, 256mb and beyond.

Just for added info, my hardware basically looks like this:

DOS: All my DOS machines run mostly on 386s through the Pentium, with other chips such as AMD 5x86 and Cyrix 686 thrown in. System memory can be anywhere from 8mb to 64mb.

Win95/98: These use the Pentium and other chips such as Pentium Pro, AMD K6 and Cyrix 686. Memory will vary from 64mb through 384mb.

Win XP: These machines run processors at 1.5GHz and higher with memory from 256mb up to 2gb.

I have not gone beyond Win XP yet.

Thanks...Joe
 
bakemono said:
Another post addressed (hah!) system memory, but as I interpretted the question to be about memory on the video card itself I would answer thusly:

DOS - 512KB gives you enough for 640x480x8bit for eg. Warcraft II. Only a few games would (optionally) use more than that
Win95 - 1MB for 2D games, or perhaps 8MB for early 3D games
Win98 - up to 128MB for early Direct3D 9 games
WinXP - 512MB should be enough for most, a few games might benefit from 1GB
Click to expand...
I would double the figures for DOS and Win95. With 512 KB, you can not use double-buffering in some games. Also, cards with that little video memory are old and slow, so not recommended anyway. 1 MB is perfect for DOS.

And when using Win95, you want >640x480 and high/true color. So 2 MB are almost a must.
 
Grandcheapskate said:
I could have definitely worded my question better. I know I could look at every game I have (which would take a VERY long time) to see the video card requirements, but my point in asking the question was basically: If I see a video card with 8mb, what era would that be from? Same for cards with 32mb, 64mb, 128mb, 256mb and beyond.

Just for added info, my hardware basically looks like this:

DOS: All my DOS machines run mostly on 386s through the Pentium, with other chips such as AMD 5x86 and Cyrix 686 thrown in. System memory can be anywhere from 8mb to 64mb.

Win95/98: These use the Pentium and other chips such as Pentium Pro, AMD K6 and Cyrix 686. Memory will vary from 64mb through 384mb.

Win XP: These machines run processors at 1.5GHz and higher with memory from 256mb up to 2gb.

I have not gone beyond Win XP yet.

Thanks...Joe
Click to expand...

My garden variety 8-bit OAK VGA can run Leisure Suit Larry and Microsoft Flight Simulator okay on a V20. From there memory requirements escalate rapidly. My 486DX-66 is running a VLB Diamond Speedstar 64 and the DOS stuff like DOOM goes pretty good with W95. I'm putting together (now up and running) a XP gamer with a mobo that supports IDE/PATA, SATA, & RAID. The system board has 4 GB with XP 32-bit and the video is a 1 GB ATI 5850 PCIe. My test for this setup is Crysis and it runs like it was the test bed for the game - real happy so far.

Tom
 
Ok since this is about video memory, it's even less about OS :) However, if you are talking historically, there were 3D games & hardware available in DOS, and some people didn't have 3D capable cards in 9X either, only 2D, even though they could make it a 3D capable system. WinXP era generally people did have 3D, except servers generally did not. So how much video memory was in the system depends on what they were doing with it. The breakdowns people shared are ok, and again, it depends on what games they wanted to play. 2D cards only need enough for on-screen, and off-screen memory is nice to have in some game design, but games designed then knew it was limited. 3D cards have more to support rendering on the GPU.

I would say that anything 8MB or lower were mostly used for 2D only framebuffers. There were the dedicated accelerators like Voodoo1/2 that have around that, but you coupled that with a 2D card anyway. I'm not sure about the other early 3D cards because they were short lived, or didn't really accelerate :)

Anything beyond 8MB usually has some kind of 3D capability.

So the choice in memory is based on what kind of card can fit into the system, the drivers for the OS, and games you want to run.
 
If one wants to enter into the older DOS/3.1/W95 gaming arena you just need to research the specs for the particular games that you intend to run. You may not be able to do it all with just one PC. Once you move on up to that dual core it's pretty much the sky is the limit. 'Unknown_K' should jump in here as he seems to have a smattering of just about everything.
 
the3dfxdude said:
I would say that anything 8MB or lower were mostly used for 2D only framebuffers. There were the dedicated accelerators like Voodoo1/2 that have around that, but you coupled that with a 2D card anyway. I'm not sure about the other early 3D cards because they were short lived, or didn't really accelerate :)
Click to expand...

There were a few standout 3D accelerators that came with less than 8MB; the best one I ever used was the Riva 128, a card that although it only had 4MB onboard was fully AGP compliant and could use system RAM for texture storage, unlike the Voodoo. For a late Windows 95/early Windows 98 contemporary accelerator they rocked pretty hard, and unless you needed Glide(*) I'd make the case that it was a better card overall than the early Voodoos.

(*Doing without Glide did involve some sacrifices back then, though, can't discount that.)

The last versions of ATI's 3D Rage series (pre-RAGE128s) also maybe weren't *quite* as terrible as their reputation paints them, but they did really fall down on certain things, especially transparency/fog effects, in a lot of games.
 
For DOS games, the amount of memory isn't a factor unless you want to run SVGA 256-color games, of which there were not that many. For such games, 1MB of VRAM allows 640x480x256 to have two video pages.

The SPEED of the memory is the most important thing, since faster VRAM results in measurable framerate increases. I'll take a 256KB fast VRAM card over a slow 1MB VRAM card any day.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
There were a few standout 3D accelerators that came with less than 8MB; the best one I ever used was the Riva 128, a card that although it only had 4MB onboard was fully AGP compliant and could use system RAM for texture storage, unlike the Voodoo. For a late Windows 95/early Windows 98 contemporary accelerator they rocked pretty hard, and unless you needed Glide(*) I'd make the case that it was a better card overall than the early Voodoos.
Click to expand...

Possibly better. I never tried on that early of Nvidia to see however. Yes I agree there are some 4MB 3D cards out there. How much one would care with limited options you can run with, I think I'd still treat them as basically a fancy 2D card :)

Then again, you mentioning the Riva 128, I do have one of these cards in storage here, and your point is well made on it's capabilities, so I'm interested to see. Maybe I should just try it and compare to other cards from '97. I'm sure someone already has done this comparison and I wouldn't be able to do any better. But having a variety of old cards around here now, it doesn't cost me anything to try all these cards that I got randomly over the years. I mean, I never would have done this back in the day, since that would have cost money, and it's funny I can do comparisons now.
 
I don't have much experience in the area of early 3D accelerators, but I will definitely mention to stay away from the original 3D Rage and 3D Rage II cards. Only the later 3D Rage Pro and later had any chance of providing actual acceleration.

I have an ATI 3D Expression+PC2TV card (3D Rage) I bought new 25 years ago, with the dream of running Wipeout and Mechwarrior 2 (both bundled with the card) in 640x480 16-bit or 24-bit color at 30 or 60fps. What the card was actually capable of was running these games at roughly the same 10-15fps the software rendering versions did on my Pentium, in 320x200, but with dithered 15-bit color and slightly better texture mapping. I actually called ATI support at the time because I thought the card was misconfigured or broken. The support person tried to blame it on my system, a Pentium 120, because it ran a 60MHz bus instead of a 66MHz bus.
 
Trixter said:
Only the later 3D Rage Pro and later had any chance of providing actual acceleration.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's those that I was thinking of, the very last of the Mach64 line; mobile versions of them were still turning up in laptops into the early 2000's and although they were objectively pretty terrible compared to what was then the bar for gaming desktops if you could actually sort out the driver issues they at least managed to be better than nothing at all. Sort of.

(I actually went through the then *incredible* hassle that was necessary to get 3D acceleration working on one of them under Linux so I could play Half-Life under WINE on my Dell Inspiron 3800, just for shock value. Many hours of my life I'll never get back.)
 
1. Video RAM for DOS games: XT EGA ISA-8 128 k , AT ISA-16 VGA 256k.
2. Video RAM for Win 95 games: ISA-16 SVGA 1 MB
3. Video RAM for Win 98 games: PCI SVGA (1024x768) 4 MB
Windows XP is hard for vintage computers.
 
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