As our games continue to become even more robust, it would seem likely that having more memory available to the GPU would prove useful, but are we soon to see 2GB cards become commonplace? After many completed tests with Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 2GB, we’re having a hard time settling on that.
Introduction

With the launch of AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 series, all we saw for months and months were 1GB models, and the reason is hard to figure out. GDDR5 pricing might not help, but given today’s games and high resolutions, wouldn’t there be some demand for a 2GB model? Well over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed that such cards are on the rise, and I knew I had to get one in and see if there was a good reason for their existence.

The card we received came in the form of the Vapor-X, from Sapphire. When I received it, I was a bit taken back, because the card as a whole is almost a spitting image of the original Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X we took a look at this past fall. That’s not a bad thing, though, as the cooler impressed me a lot, as did the performance of the card itself.

Past that, having the exact same model and cooler of a card with more memory is nice, because you can compare the performance from a true Apples to Apples standpoint, and that’s what we’ll be doing here today.

If you’re asking yourself why 2GB on a GPU would ever be needed, in the simplest terms it’s because games are becoming beefier and beefier, and while 512MB was fine for a GPU a couple of years ago, today’s bare minimum is 1GB. 2GB is admittedly not going to deliver night and day performance (as we’ll see), but if you’re not looking to upgrade your GPU for a while, investing in a 2GB card today may not be such a bad idea (as long as it offers reasonable performance to begin with, of course.)

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• READ MORE (Source): Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 2GB: Introduction – Techgage