PCPER.com: 5 GHZ+ Phenom II Overclock on Dry Ice, 6Ghz on LN2

[Jazzman]

When textures are being loaded successfully to the VRAM, they are free'd. Keeping them is useless wasting of RAM. Doesn't that make sense? When a texture does not fit into VRAM, it is being kept and then fetched from the RAM when needed. Obviously, this is slow.

According to this pc expert video ram is reserved by the OS at boot. So if you have 1 gig of vram the system will reserve 1 gig of system ram as well. You can verify the ram reserved by your system in device manager.

"Power users with a hankerin' for dual graphics cards may be experiencing something of a sinking feeling, at this juncture. Yes, the 256Mb reserved for my little old graphics card means exactly what you think it means: Those two 768Mb graphics cards you can totally justify buying will eat one point five gigabytes of your 32-bit memory map all by themselves, cutting you down to a 2.5Gb ceiling before you even take the other reservations into account."

[Macadamia]

Hmm?

Jazzman, from reading that article, I thought what he said was that Video Card RAM is counted as a part of addressable RAM, and hence will limit the amount of the latter if the former is too big, and the system is on 32-bit (much easier to cap).


It certainly did not say that the same amount of RAM is being reserved by the OS as that would be ridiculous.

[Jazzman]

Hmm?

Jazzman, from reading that article, I thought what he said was that Video Card RAM is counted as a part of addressable RAM, and hence will limit the amount of the latter if the former is too big, and the system is on 32-bit (much easier to cap).


It certainly did not say that the same amount of RAM is being reserved by the OS as that would be ridiculous.

I disagree Macadamia. The author clearly states that the RAM is reserved by the OS. The larger the VRAM on the video card the larger the mapped reserved area in the OS. As I mentioned above, you can verify this fact by looking at the hex range mapped in device manager, with my card I can see the 512mb reserved. This leaves less area for programs and can hinder game performance. However, I think in the AMD demo (to get the thread back on track) Crysis does not demand more RAM than is available in the 3 gig trichannel system. Nonetheless there could have been other threads active during the comparison test; so we will just have to see what XS members get in January.

[cadaveca]

It's not up to the OS, Jazz, it's up to the driver to identify to the OS how much ram should be reserved. It's teh same for BIOS remapping...ATI cards reserve 256MB physical in bios only, even if they have 1GB of onboard vram.

I had 2x 3870x2, and going by what's posted in your link, bios should have remapped everything above 2gb, as each card has 512mb of ram, however, it only assigned 256MB per 3870x2...for a total of 512mb reserved.

[Eson]

Video RAM only reserve memory addresses, not memory. As stated with max 4GB on a 32bit system, maybe 400MB is reserved for Windows only. Which means maximum memory is only 3.6GB. If you only has 512MB of memory you wont notice a thing. But if you have 4GB of memory you will only be able to use 3.6GB.

[Calmatory]

Jazzman, is that so? Then how I was able to run an XP system with 128 MB of RAM which had GeForce 4 MX 4000 with 128 MB of VRAM? It ran Soldat and Teeworlds just fine.

[cadaveca]

Video RAM only reserve memory addresses, not memory. As stated with max 4GB on a 32bit system, maybe 400MB is reserved for Windows only. Which means maximum memory is only 3.6GB. If you only has 512MB of memory you wont notice a thing. But if you have 4GB of memory you will only be able to use 3.6GB.

PAE solves this issue.

Jazzman, is that so? Then how I was able to run an XP system with 128 MB of RAM which had GeForce 4 MX 4000 with 128 MB of VRAM? It ran Soldat and Teeworlds just fine.

Becuase you've not exceeded teh 4gb maximum of 32-bit programming.

XP reserves so much ram per device, in order to be able to communicate with it...commands get cached within this "space". In the end it doesn't really matter, as most 32-bit programs are capped at 2gb of usable mem, so that windows and devices have what they need to operate.

But it's Virtual addresses...this is what Jazzman is talking about. Physical ram is different, and dealt with by bios.

[Rammsteiner]

Why do you hate me so much? Please get back on topic or please stop messing up the thread with your Troll rants.

Or as we say in Dutch, UPG

Just a bit sad but well, not my problem.

[Donnie27]

PAE solves this issue.

Becuase you've not exceeded teh 4gb maximum of 32-bit programming.

XP reserves so much ram per device, in order to be able to communicate with it...commands get cached within this "space". In the end it doesn't really matter, as most 32-bit programs are capped at 2gb of usable mem, so that windows and devices have what they need to operate.

But it's Virtual addresses...this is what Jazzman is talking about. Physical ram is different, and dealt with by bios.

http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/view...5b99978de10f8e

System is up and RUNNING with 4 GB of RAM.It's quite a crazy difference between 2 and 4 GB. RAM shows up as 2.8 GB from Windows Task Manager.

Quite happy with the new RAM. (My video card is a 1GB 9800GX2,so that's what is probably affecting the total amount of RAM showing up under Windows Task Manager.) Also,I'm running 32-bit Vista Ultimate.

The way I was told just what Jazzman was told. Here's the reply from that thread.

Yeah, that's about right. 4096MB (installed RAM) - 1024MB frame buffer = 3072MB available. Less MMIO devices, 2.8GB sounds about right - you're only losing about another 256MB or so (addressable RAM) to the motherboard devices & add-in cards.

I wonder if the Memory allocation for Video/Graphic settings in the BIOS will change anything. I should have tested it. I saw my RAM total drop as well when I went from a 256MB X1800 to a 512MB 3850, and even the 64MB on my sound card is eats up 64MB of system RAM. That or it magically used 64MB somewhere else.

[cadaveca]

Donnie, that's how nV cards behave, not ALL cards. Which is my point, BTW. The used info here is of a limited scope. That's how it works in that situation, but not all situations are the same.




I'm not into arguing today, so I'll also note that SP1 fixes the issues with 4GB showing less than 4gb, and for those that it doesn't there is a fix from Microsoft which fixes the issus, which was in a thread here recently. Check my posts.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950233

[Donnie27]

Donnie, that's how nV cards behave, not ALL cards. Which is my point, BTW. The used info here is of a limited scope. That's how it works in that situation, but not all situations are the same.




I'm not into arguing today, so I'll also note that SP1 fixes the issues with 4GB showing less than 4gb, and for those that it doesn't there is a fix from Microsoft which fixes the issus, which was in a thread here recently. Check my posts.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950233

I'm not arguing either, I said I was told, NOT I know. As the other link talked about, this issue is still there, just NOT reported. But yes, thanks for the link

[Cooper]

Closed