I'm considering buying the Gigabyte GeForce 9600GT 720MHZ 1GB 2.0GHZ card for roughly under 250$ but I'm unsure if it will work as I anticipate.

I'm currently playing Age of Conan and there is constant loading spikes when I move my camera around, suggesting that incoming players' textures are being loaded to VRAM.

What I'm asking is; Will these texture intensive games like Age of Conan, benefit from 1GB of on-board VRAM or does a video card constantly check for textures in system memory when it needs it? Do games load textures freely in video memory and use them as needed or does it just not work that way?

I'm also Referring the following post: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/252174-33-512mb-card
Unfortunately it doesn't answer my question entirely.

Age of Conan is poorly optimized with basically any and every hardware component I've tried thus far. I've used from a minimum of a 8800 GTS up to a GTX280 (1 GB vid card) on a benchmark system. No matter what I've noticed that there will be a certain amount of lag no matter how powerful the system. The best thing I've found in optimizing gameplay on AoC is to have 4GB of ram and a minimum of and 8800GT graphics card. Beyond that it seems to be a waiting game until Funcom can release some patches to fix the issues.

Also, instead of paying 250 for the 9600GT I'd look at either the 9800 GTX (better even with less memory) or either of the 4800 series cards from ATI. The 4870, with only 512 MB of memory, actually has substanially higher memory throughput just because it's DDR5.

^ agree

Yea ATI doesn't actually need that 1gb of ram because of this it is how they do things. If only they made bandwith 512 they would pretty awsome.

don't get the 1GB version... the bus isn't big enough for that much ram to be used properly

Well thank you very much for the info. "cokenbeer" you were very reassuring in your reply and I'm going to rethink my purchase now.

And thanks everyone else too.