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If I have budget for one of two graphics cards as an upgrade, where one has more RAM but the other a faster clock speed on the GPU, which would have the biggest impact on gaming performance? The one with more RAM, or the "faster" one? All other factors should be considered equal (drivers, chipset, manufacturer, price, etc).

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You have GPU vs RAM in the question, however (and this depends on the game) a fast hard drive - RAID 0 SATA or SSD - is equally as important if you want maps to load quickly. – Chris S Jul 14 '10 at 22:23
@chris absolutely correct. I switched playing games off my 500gb harddrive, because I need my 160gb for time machine. The drop in performance is astounding, to the point that I'm considering getting a 64gb sd card for running games. The biggest performance boost I got was from upping the underclocked 9400m on my machine, but that's after I upped to 4gb ram. It's really hard to figure which piece made the biggest difference. The rule of thumb I use is that your machine will run as well as the worst component will allow it to. – Mechko Jul 19 '10 at 5:26

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Both ;)

You need RAM to hold the data - polygons, textures etc. More ram will allow you to show more detailed textures and run at higher resolutions.

You need a good GPU to do all the calculations needed for a modern game - lighting, physics etc. The better the GPU the more of these calculations you can do so you'll get better effects and it will have an impact on the resolution too.

Check the specs of those cards and then you need to decide what's important - resolution, effects etc. and go for the card that's better at those things.

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I would also add that, for the GPU, speed is not the sole criteria you need to look at. I'm not sure why the manufacturers make this so hard to figure out, but for example an nVidia GTX and GS are extremely far apart in performance even if running at the same core speed. – GalacticCowboy Jul 19 '10 at 17:42
up vote 5 down vote

Having a big amount of RAM could help when playing at big resolutions, let me say 1920x1080 and more.

For resolutions like 1680x1050 or less 1GB would be great but even 512MB is enough for most of games event at the highest texture detail setting.

If your monitor is 1680x1050 or less and the video card you choose has already 1GB I would suggest you to go for faster clock speed otherwise take the one with 1.5GB or 2GB of RAM.

ps. Clock frequencies can be overclocked, RAM amount cannot be increased ;)

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This is helpful for people who use a performance CRT for gaming, as they don't need to stick to a high native res to get a sharp image, so better "effects" (including AA and AF) are more important. – MGOwen Jul 20 '10 at 6:39

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