If ever there was an example of a company that has absolutely no moral qualms about exploiting it's less tech savvy customers, this would be it.
With video cards as you turn up texture quality, anti aliasing, and resolution, the card uses more video memory. High end video cards using the highest texture and AA levels and running on high resolution monitors or multiple monitors will come equipped with 2GB or 3GB of RAM per GPU for the task. While more mainstream gaming cards are typically perfectly fine with just 1GB of RAM.
Point of View, a graphics card manufacture released a new GTX 550 Ti card, this is a low end card not capable of using high graphics settings with AA and high resolution. You would not even want to use this with a 23 or 24 inch monitor for gaming. The issue isn't memory, it's the GPU just isn't powerful enough. So there is absolutely NO POINT IN THE WORLD to use more than 1GB of memory with this GPU.
But they put 4GB of RAM on a low end video card. Not only did they load a low end card with an obscene amount of memory, they used the cheapest option, slow GDDR3. This GPU normally would be bundled with faster GDDR5. So not only do you have an insane amount of RAM, most of which won't be used, the RAM you do use is slower. Using this 4GB GTX 550 TI would be worse off than using a 1GB GTX 550 Ti with GDDR5 memory.
But someone going out shopping for a video card to play WOW of The Sims 3, may not know better. They just see GTX 550 Ti 1GB vs GTX 550 Ti 4GB. Looks like an easy decision. Point of View, that is so lame. Shame on ya'll.
If my rant isn't enough, The Tech Report rants on here.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21536
"Nvidia partner Point of View has come up with a GeForce 550 Ti with four gigabytes of graphics memory, which makes about as much sense as putting a spoiler on a Smart car. Epic fail."
