[Kalean]

GPU speed is not more essential. They both come hand in hand..If you don't have enough vram to handle all the textures, your gpu would bottle neck by not having enough memory, and vice versa as well. If you have tons of Vram and your gpu isn't up to snuff...the same will happen, performance won't increase due to the more memory, but it won't degrade performance either. They both go hand in hand...

regarding searching for game benchmarks..You just can't do that...Guild wars isn't graphically demanding at all considering the title. Also keep in mind guild wars is zone based...Small zones loaded...So your frame rate would increase because of that. I don't disagree with you when you say gpu performance is essential..It is..But if you don't have enough vram, you will lag up. Aion will also have loaded zones, which help in system performance, if you've played L2...you'd find out that full world rendered MMO's can bring your computer down to it's knees. But it's not fair to compare any game to aion, yes it uses a farcry engine, but it's heavily modified. Plus, the amount of textures that will be loaded at one time is FAR greater then what farcry has done...so you can't compare frame rates...But what you can tell, is by looking at that link posted prior...the guy was running high settings with a high resolution...the 3870 is a very capable card...If that was a 256mb card...his rig would chug along even worse.

It's not necessarily an issue if you are playing at 1280x1024 or lower, but if you plan to play in 1650x1050 or higher, you NEED to get a card with 512mb of video memory, otherwise you'd not be getting the true performance of your card under those scenarios...You don't want to be limited by the amount of ram on your card...and the difference in price between a 3850 with 256mb, to a 3850 with 512 or a 9600 GT 512, for 149.99..That's 20 dollars more then the 3850 with 256mb's...

Also, it's not all about "ohh I have more memory then you" It's a fundamental fact that using a 256mb card in a 1650x1050 will result in a performance drop, in 1920 it's even more massive...If you took a 3850 with 256mb of ram, and a 3850 with 512mb ram, both with identical gpu/memory clocks..you'd see a world of difference in frame rates in aion at 1650x1050 and 1920x1200. If you took the 512 and compared it to a 1gb model..you would see almost no difference what so ever...Getting excessive components are indeed bad and wasted funds, but you should at least make sure you are buying parts that won't be held back by something as small as video memory,and for 20 bucks...that's a big limiting factor for a very small cost. The threshold for 256mb cards is 1280x1024...if you plan to game in 1650 or higher resolutions..you need to look at 512mb....Anything more than that is useless. In terms of the 8800 GTX and all that jazz it's alright..Especially for 2560x1600 resolutions (30 inch displays), but for 1650x1050, and 1920x1200, 512 mb is ideal.