64meg or 128meg vid card?

[oldskoolcade]

I know this is a no-brainer in most cases, but with some of the newer emulated 3d games,  it's got me wondering.  Here's the deal:

I have a G4-ti4200 in my arcade box right now, and it's hooked up via composite out to a 25 inch RCA tv.   The pic quality isn't the greatest, but then again it's not too bad, and I don't mind.   I've read that ATI vid cards tend to have a better tv-out capability, so every little bit helps right?  I've got myself set on getting an older Radeon 8500 card (they were great cards for their time), but they come in 64 meg and 128 meg flavours.  The question is:  do I really need the 128 meg variety, if I intend on trying to play some of the newer emulators (i.e. Zinc, Nebula, etc).

If anyone has any insight into this, I'd greatly appreciate it!

cheers!
Mike

[menace]

Just to give you some perspective--I have a 4mb ATI rage 128 running my tv-cade and it looks great--any true emulation is done via the cpu, the graphics card is just there to interpret the video into something we recognize, it doesn't usually handle any of the video calculations.  the long and the short of it is that you only need the bare minimum as far as video cards are concerned.

[android]

The memory in a video card is used to store textures, so it's faster to transfer from memory than from hard disk / RAM. Therefore, since no Mame games use textures, it really makes no difference whether you have 32, 64 or 128 megs of ram in your video card. All you need to run MAME correctly is a fast 2D (yes: 2D, not 3D) video card. Even 3D is done in software within MAME.

[oldskoolcade]

see therein lies the problem...MAME  isn't the only thing in the Tv Cade.... I've got Zinc running, as well as nebula....but I've also got Tiger 2003 for PC in there as well....So if it's the only thing using the graphics card memory, then I guess the 64meg would suffice...hmmmmmm....Still would rather the ATI tv out though....

Thanks for the help guys!