Graphics Amount of RAM the video card uses PLZ HELP

I need to know the steps to changing the amount of RAM that the video card uses from 125mb to 256mb. I dont know much about computers so I need all your help. I have an nvidia 5600 FX video card. Yes, i called nvidia and they couldnt help... I tried lots of other places too, none of them could help. So i just need to know how to change the amount of RAm that the video card uses. Please get back to me as soon as possible.

 

So what is the cards actual amount of memory? 256Mb?

 

yes its 256mb

 

sorry, I'm confused, what exactly do you want to do? Make your graphics use more of it's onboard memory OR get it to use your RAM sticks ?

 

I want the video performance to be better. A person who worked at Comp usa said that i can change it. I guess onboard because a stick of Ram on my comp are both 512mb. u seem to know more than me so i guess just tell me the best one to do.

 

you can try going into the bios to change your AGP aperture size to 256mb (if your motherboard will support that). I highly doubt that is the problem, but its worth a check since it will only take a simple reboot.

Reboot, press delete (or whatever you use to get into the bios), and poke around looking for the AGP aperture setting. Good luck and don't break anything.

 

The person who worked at Comp USA seems to have known about as much as you, but decided to blag it.

You want better performance, buy a better card, selling cards that only work at 60% of their capacity doesn't happen very often, and it hasn't in your case. Your video card will use all the ram it needs, untill it fills all the ram it has, simple as that.

Other then that, welcome to bit-tech, read the rules, take your time over posts, and do your best to use proper English, and you'll love the place

 

I'd imagine they were talking about the aperture size (in the bios), but it really doesn't have any effect. IIRC, it reserves system ram that the GPU can use in case it overloads its own (effectively page file for graphics cards).

 

What's AGP and how do I get into bio's?

 

You won't change anything in there, or at least, shouldn't, so don't worry about it.

 

If you don't know how to get in, it's for your own good that you can't. However, that's where the (pointless) AGP aperture setting is.

Anyways, the card uses (up to) all it has. You can't change that. If it needs less, it'll use less. If it needs more, the framerate drops. Any salesperson that tells you otherwise got a little too stoned before coming into work, or is a complete f'ing moron (like the numbskull that tried to convince me back in about 1994 it was Sonic 3 that had the opening on top to stick on another game, "Lock-on technology", to get more levels and whatnot, probably the earliest variant on the expansion pack ever).

If this is something that you've deduced yourself, I'd be quite interested to know how. If you alt-tabbed out of a game and looked in task manager, that's system ram that's in use, not video ram.

 

A graphics card has a certain amount of RAM. More is better, but you can't upgrade them unless you're using some vintage piece of hardware from the early 90s. Nor will increasing your AGP aperture size increase performance (a common misconception). Here's why, just to clear things up:

When your AGP graphics card boots, its RAM is mapped into the address space around 4GB. Putting it here was good - practically no desktop systems that need high-performance graphics have more than 2GB of RAM even now (however, this and PCI address mapping are what cause you lose half a gig or so if you use 4GB without MMIO address remapping).

Anyway, whenever a request is sent to this memory area, it's forwarded directly onto the graphics card's much higher speed RAM. Your graphics card, unfortunately, doesn't have an infinite amount of RAM and if it runs out, it does need to page it to main memory. This is where the aparture comes in.

The problem with dynamically reserving the memory for this purpose in 4K chunks, as it is designed to, is that they'll inevitably take an area that isn't contiguous. This spreading all over the RAM will hinder performance due to software having to look all over the place to find things. Therefore, the aperture actually remaps these areas to a series of contiguous addresses that are usually just below where the graphics card's main memory is; this remapping is done in hardware by a GART (graphics address remapping table) built into the northbridge of AGP-supporting chipsets. This reallocation does not only occur when the card runs out of memory - game designers can use "non-local" textures that are put into system RAM to save space on the graphics card.

PCI-Express video cards do not require this feature in the BIOS because their GART is built-in, meaning no more misconceptions about aperture size increasing performance.

 

great information hitman...what I don't get are what the different size settings are for, then? If my card has 128mb of ram and I set the aperture to 128mb, am I telling the GART to allocate a size of 128mb in my system memory (in the even of overflow), or am I telling it to start paging files over to the system memory when my 128mb of video card ram taps out?

I understand the aperture simply organizes the gpu's page filing on system memory to increase performance...but what difference does it make if I set it to 8mb vs. 256mb?

 

Setting it to a low value won't decrease the RAM usage since the mapped area is actually done above the installed physical memory and there's no use of physical memory until your VRAM is full (or if the game uses non-local textures). You'll be best off setting it to around the same size as your video card's RAM to avoid any nasty "out of memory" errors. Having it at 8MB may cause problems.