video memory / ram ?

Hi,

What amount of video memory should I take as a limit to consider so my fps game can be playable on budget gaming computers too?

I am developing it on a laptop with 840m, which according to this page (http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-840M.105681.0.html) has a max amount of memory of 4096 MB and 2 GB of DDR3 memory. I take it that 2 gb is the video memory right? When I check d3d_texfree on startup of my game it says 4095 mb, it this 2 gb from the card plus 2 gb that windows creates?

Am I correct to assume that most budget gamers will have a video card with the same amount of video memory or more?

The 840m has a standard memory size of 2048MB.
The minimum everyone should have is atleast 1gb of vram, most intel onboard gpus have that amount.

Ty for reply. What I find confusing however is when I check d3d_texfree I seem to have alot of video memory free, but I still get error messages when placing to more models with fairly big textures (2048x2048 with normal maps too) in the map (it does not seem to be related to something specific).

The error message -> "Error E2005 - Can't create D3D texture
The texture format is invalid or unsupported by your video card. Very old video cards often don't support DirectX 9 and can not create textures of the given size or format."

Well, all your textures are also stored in the normal RAM.
DirectX has some pooling options for them, I also had alot of problems with acknex when my models/textures/maps were too big for it.
I never checked the real cause of this error, pretty sure its related to acknex and how it manages the RAM.
Maybe you should ask JCL about this? I would also be interested in an answer.
What you need to know is that you can have max 4gb RAM with acknex since its x86 (32 bit only)

Good idea, I am interested in what JCL will answer. Also I am almost forgot about the 32 bit only limit, I quess hq textures option won't be viable than.