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Shared video memory

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:32 am
by henryan
I got the following from WEI:

Display adapter type NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M
Total available graphics memory 1007 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 256 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 751 MB
Display adapter driver version 7.15.11.5666
Primary monitor resolution 1920x1200
DirectX version DirectX 9.0 or better

Does the graphics card have to take that much, 751M, from the system memory? I only got 2G main memory, is this gonna slow down my machine?

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:57 am
by Pocket Aces
It's probably adaptive, so it pulls up to that much main memory if it needs it. I wouldn't worry about it.

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 11:12 am
by Pascal_TTH
Pocket Aces wrote:It's probably adaptive, so it pulls up to that much main memory if it needs it. I wouldn't worry about it.
True ! Dynamically adaptive... It's the same for any PCI-Express GPU. It was nearly the same with AGP but [censored] slower.

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 12:38 pm
by henryan
Okay, sounds good :)

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 1:06 pm
by SHoTTa35
Well actually it's not even using it. It's just showing you what it can take maximum when needed. Your system with 2GB will allow Vista to use that much for normal stuff. When you are gaming then Vista drops most uneeded stuff from RAM and put them into the pagefile and then the Video Card (based on drivers) can take up to that much of normal RAM to use as VRAM.

Older machines would take the RAM because they dind't have any for themselves to run anything at all so if that was the case then yeah you would worry with it sucking that much for itsel because even tho they call it "shared" back then too it was really locked for the video card and the OS couldn't use it at all. Newer cards just make use of RAM that's available instead of the Pagefile since that's much slower.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:16 am
by Marie-Anne
I was wondering myself for a long time, where is my generous graphics RAM 512 MB!!!! coming from.

My baby: T60, model 2008ZWA, 15' FLEXVIEW (1400x1050), ATI X1400.

How can I determine how much RAM is included with ATI X1400 hardware itself, and how much RAM is coming from system memory?

I'm puzzled as well by what Lenovo reports about 2008ZWA model:

Product: ThinkPad T60 2008-ZWA
Original description: Based on 2008-CTO: T5600(1.83GHz), 1GB RAM, 100GB 5400rpm HD, 15in 1400x1050 LCD, 128MB ATI Radeon X1400, CDRW/DVDRW, Intel 802.11abg wireless, Bluetooth/Modem, 1Gb Ethernet, UltraNav, Secure chip, 6c Li-Ion batt, WinXP Home

Contrary to above info, my T60 has a different configuration:
7200 rpm Harddisk, 512MB ATI Radeon X1400.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:46 am
by Pascal_TTH
128 MB true video memory and 384 MB from the RAM.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:48 am
by SHoTTa35
hey, my friend is in Amsterdam :)

Anyways, as was stated, your card has 128MB of RAM and can share not that it IS sharing it but it can use up to an extra 384MB of the RAM if needed.

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 4:45 am
by Marie-Anne
Pascal_TTH wrote:128 MB true video memory
Oh, NOT so generous as I would have hoped. A real pity.
Luckily, when I purchased the unit, I ordered an extra 1GB RAM module to be installed, upgrading it to 2 GB in total.

Pascal, SHoTTa35, both thanks for your replies!