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Making use of graphic card RAM
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geekboy
Junior Member
_ 		22. October 2004 @ 18:14 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   

Hey pals n' gals,

A simple question for the tech-heads but one which I cannot find the answer to via search engines,

Ok I've got a 128mb graphics card, when playing games the card goes into full use; 3d acceleration, direct X etc.
When not playing games, the card acts as a basic driver unit for the monitor, giving nice 16/32 bit colour with a beautiful resolution and refresh rate.

So when not going wild with games (Jedi Academy..love it) the 128 ram is just sitting there:
So my question is; can I hook this RAM up with my existing 512mb DDR to give me that extra punch when encoding a vcd, processing a lot of stuff, shrinking etc..???

Is there an interface I need to let the mobo/OS know that we're gonna access the graphic card's RAM?

Any tips or links to relative online pages would be sweet (I did do a search on the AD forums but nothing came up)

take it easy,
geekboy
[ + quote]
ddp
Moderator
_ 		22. October 2004 @ 19:09 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
motherboard wise no as it doesn't know what ram the videocard has, software wise, there might be a program out there but it might be an emulator which might use some of your main ram. might be better just to get more ram for motherboard
[ + quote]
The_OGS
Senior Member
_ 		23. October 2004 @ 22:32 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
Apparently, there is a specialized scientific software company that has figured out how to offload calculations from the CPU to the GPU - it's got all the scientists in a tizzy because the GPU is wickedly fast, and saves them hours of CPU time...
But geekboy, graphics card memory is frame buffer memory for 3d acceleration.
If the vidcard requires more, it swaps into your system RAM, through the AGP aperture.
To the best of my knowledge, it does not work the other way...
The best thing you can do is reduce the size of your AGP aperture (in BIOS).
64MB is fine for most people, and generous for folks with only 256MB system RAM.
128MB+ is crazy unless you have 1GB memory, or Doom3, or both :)
At least then your RAM will be available totally, with minimum reserved for vidcard use via AGP.
Regards
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