I don't think its pointless, I would think that not having to transfer 1/2G of textures from the hard drive (slowest part of the whole system) every so often would be more valuable then a lot of other things of a similar price. Even a slower gpu with 1G would seem to me to be better then a faster gpu with 1/2G. Even a slower cpu would hurt less then less ram on the graphic card I would think.

Minimizing Hard Drive access is the name of the game.

But ya he can multibox with 1/2G (I do on 3 of my computers but the upgrade to 1G video ram is the first thing Ill do to upgrade).