I will be buying a 15" MBP and am trying to decide between the 128 and 256 graphics card. I am not a gamer, so does it really matter for me?

I have heard that Safari renders pages better with the 256 but am not sure if that is true or, if it is true, if it is that big of a difference.

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

I've never had a problem with the 128meg in mine (although I only played WOW, Fallout 1&2, Diablo 1&2, starcraft, guild wars, and basically anything that is not a shooter). I've heard they actually do ok on half life as well tho, so yeah I "personally" think it might be a waste, dependent upon how much you can realistically afford to spend. Just remember the MAIN rule of thumb.....ALWAYS SPEND AS MUCH AS YOU CAN AFFORD, expecially with a laptop, or a system that you cant upgrade graphics system on.

Good luck!!!

Definitely. If you can afford the 256, get it. There's no reason to settle for something less especially with a notebook.

In the future, more and more games will become texture intensive...and will load massive textures onto your GPU. This is where having more video memory will make your games smoother. Remember...more physical or video memory does not equal higher frames per second....it equals smoother frames per second. This is a common misconception. Few games that currently have massive GPU memory texture offloading currently are Doom 3, Quake 4, Flight Simulator X, and Age of Empires 3.

Having 128MB would not hurt...infact in terms of frames per second it would make no difference....its juts that in games that have massive/high res textures...the game would stutter due to harddrive texture scratching. The actual speed of the game depends on the amount of pixel pipelines (Dx9 cards only), amount of stream processors (Dx10 cards only), and the core/memory clock speeds.

Another reason other than gaming where having a higher GPU memory would be specific to OS X itslef. Quartz Extreme takes advantage of GPU memory, and uses it efficiently, so your animations in OS X will be more smoother on 256MB vs 128MB....however the difference will only become apparent when you have lots of windows/apps running...and try to do something like Expose.

Cool - thanks for the tips...

Nice and informative post EFI, thx!
I'm also considering buying a mbp.
I will probably go with the 128mb version.
Because I'm just a student and don't have aditional 500$.
And I'm trying to game less, and to work more...

Edit: I have a question, when buying a mbp in usa for 1899$, do I have to pay aditional taxes?
How much would it be all in all with taxes and everything? thx

depends on where you buy it. different states have different sales tax