There are two basic reasons for memory on a video card. The first is for the frame buffer for the display, and represents the uncompressed image size to cover your resolution and color depth. To calculate this for your monitor at 2560x1600 and 32 bit color is simple:
(2560x1600x32)/1024/1024=125MB of video memory needed for one frame.
Close. That's 125m
bits of video memory, or little under 32M
Bytes, per frame.
Edit: the original calculation also seems to be over by a factor of two. 2560 x 1600 x 4bytes(32bits) = 16MBytes / frame, not 32Mbytes.High quality hardware playback of video likes to have at least 5 frames available for temporal/spatial deinterlacing algorithms, so that's about 80MBytes minimum for video playback, plus whatever the desktop wants.
In practice, Linux/Myth users have discovered that 256MBytes is not quite enough in total, but 512MBytes seems to be plenty.
Cheers
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