Maximum PC

I've got one of those nice little NVidia ION motherboards (from Zotac, the one with the full PCIExpress x16 slot and the Atom 330 on it). Anyway, I've got 4GB on the board of RAM, and was wondering what is the appropriate amount of memory to allocate for video (i think the board can allocate up to 512MB, but I can limit it in the BIOS). I don't want to allocate too much, but just enough so that it can play Blu-Ray and other HD content.

Is 256MB enough? Or should I just go the full 512MB? Is more better for this scenario?

Although I'd imagine that 256 MBs is more than enough, I've never seen the question asked/answered.

What playback software will you be using?

n0b0dykn0ws

Since I actually don't have any BR media yet, I'm guessing that (for now) I'd probably use PowerDVD unless something better (and maybe less expensive--possibly free) comes along. It's not a big deal since i Have 4GB on the board, Just thought I'd see what others were running at. I'd imagine that anything more than 512MB is not really neccesary for playback.

There's an ATi 2400 XT with only 256MB of memory and it supports Blu-ray playback.

Arcsoft and Cyberlink do not state the required amount of video RAM.

I imagine that memory isn't as much of an issue, since more emphasis is probably placed on the actual GPU performance for hardware decoding.

n0b0dykn0ws

If they don't state Vram requirements then that suggests that it is indeed not important.

Even uncompressed a 1920x1080 picture is only a few megabytes. So as long as the GPU can crunch 30 of these per second then memory isn't going to be an issue. Or at least in theory.

I figured as such (as long as you have something like 128 MB, which most computers even with onboard video, have). That and it's not like a game where you have to fill the memory with data as in a game.... I'll probably just have to play around with it a little. I mean 256MB isn't a big deal, but I don't want to waste memory if I don't have to (because the system will also double up as a file server and maybe a small web server so memory is memory in that machine, and while 256MB isn't anything to lose sleep over, it could help performance in any way possible.