In comparison to the Radeon X1900 XT 512MB, the reduced amount of memory present on the 256MB card does impact performance somewhat, but fortunately the performance penalty isn’t too severe. Overall the performance drop going from 512MB down to 256MB is roughly 5%, but there are cases such as F.E.A.R. where the performance decline is as great as 7% at 1280x1024. Of course, if you planned on gaming at 6xAA, the performance decline is going to be even greater, we saw performance decline by anywhere from 9-14%, so if you’d like to game at high AA settings, you’ll want to splurge for the 512MB card if you can afford it.