How important is sdram on my imac

Just wondering how important it was to have 512mb of ram on sl. is it possible to run sl on 256mb can someone please advise me

I have a NVIDIA 7900 card with 256 Ram. Runs great.
I see fps of 40-50 fairly often.
Some stores with a Bazillion textures are slow to load..but thats' to be expected.

Smaller amounts are okay, too. (in fact, one famous vid card makers cards wouldn't work in SL unless you restricted their memory to 128. Hahahah! (that's fixed now))

What seems to be most important at the moment are:
1. Bus Type. 'PCI-16' is better than 'PCI-E' is better than 'AGP' is better than 'PCI'.
2. Firmware. Get a vidcard with DirectX version 9c, and OpenGL 2.0
3. RAM of 512 is better than 256 is better than 128, etc.
4. Manufacturer. Right now, the consensus is that NVIDIA's graphics are better than ATI. If you have a MACINTOSH, however, the ATI drivers are thought to be better.

Maximize these factors to get the best card within your budget.

This is my graphics card all i am wondering is if the lack of ram could be contributing to my constant crashing

GeForce FX 5200:

Chipset Model: GeForce FX 5200
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
Slot: AGP
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: nVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0329
Revision ID: 0x00b1
ROM Revision: 2103
Displays:
iMac:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1440 x 900
Depth: 32-bit Color
Built-In: Yes
Core Image: Supported
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Display:
Status: No display connected

I have a suspicion that a lot of the 1.15 "update" problems on the Mac may be related to an incompatibility between the update software and the Nvidia graphics cards. For example, on my PowerBook (that has basically the same FX 5200 graphics as your iMac) there are many odd, random problems like textures suddenly changing, random stalls, etc. I'm not seeing the constant crashing however.

To answer your question, for the video card 256 MB is plenty and will give you a great SL experience. But if you don't have at least 1 GB of main memory...buy more immediately if not sooner!

Tips to reduce the load on the graphics card (which should help with black textures, flickering textures, grey textures, assorted mice stuck in the gears, etc.)
1. Reduce your monitor resolution to 800x640.
2. Run in Full screen mode
3. Draw distance at 64
4. Turn OFF VBO and anisotropicsherihemicidal whatever that is.
5. Turn off the various filters and fancies in prefs, such as Bumpy and Shiny and Blingy.
6. Move the Sliders to the left, decreasing detail on trees, and faces and clothing and terrain, etc.
7. In World in your viewer, at the bottom of the VIEW window is a submenu where you can turn OFF the Particles.

Try that. then slowly ADD options that you miss the most. When response time and FPS become unbearable, you know you've gone too far.

FWIW, I'm running an old eMac, and bumping the RAM from 256 to 1gig made all the difference in the world.

Someday I hope to have this eMac grow up into a REAL computer...until then, RAM is a wonderful thing.

get 1gig ram (not vram) at least, definitely. more than that may not help too much, but just going 512meg to 1gig on my lil' emac definitely helped!! (remember to up the disk cache, under the preferences/network tab, to 1000mb, when you do so

after that, may help more to have a machine that is upgradable for the video card... but get that 1gig, stat!!