Allocate ram memory to video card?

[SuperKungFu]

I heard you can allocated some memory from your ram to your video card by going through BIOS. Of course it’s not going to be dedicated memory but will it give some boost in fps or loading times? Just wanted to know if some of you boys have already tried this?

[hitman]

Id like to know as well...but considering i cant screw with the BIOS on this thing...

[Aeroscout]

I think thats only with those stupid intigrated videocards.

 

"up to 128Mb shared video RAM" (dumb...:P)

 

sorry, it would be cool. maybe i'm wrong... I havent heard of the BOIS thing before...

[SuperKungFu]

no you could allocate some memory to your video card from your ram, my friend did that on his laptop. He had 2 gigs of ram and a 256 mb 7600 graphics card so he boost it to 512 mb on the video. But he doesn't play any games so i can't tell if it gives a boost in anything.

[Black_Hawk]

Get Rivatuner, you can allocate system RAM to your GPU from there. If you want to I can post the procedure...

[SuperKungFu]

yea sure go ahead, the more info the better.

[hitman]

Yes please.

[emenance]

Its called AGP aperture in the Bios. just go into the bios and set it. This setting controls how much system ram can be allocated to AGP for video purposes. This setting is for INTEGRATED AND NON INTEGRATED video motherboards. The aperture is a portion of the pci memory address range dedicated to graphics memory address space. Host cycles that hit the aperture range are forwarded to the AGP without any translation. The option allows for 32 64 128 256 and 512 mb size.

 

Guys this was just talked about in this section a month ago. Just set this to whatever you video card mem is. Forexample if your video card is 256 mb then set apature size to 256. ETC its that easy. Get into the bios and do it.

 

Or READ YOUR MOTHERBOARD MANUAL :)

 

still wondering what to do?

http://www.techarp.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?lang=0&bogno=32

 

I recommend for lock on you match your video mem.

[hitman]

Guess im SOL.

[Black_Hawk]

Currently I have RivaTuner 2.0 Release Candidate 16, there are probably newer versions out but the procedure should basically be the same.

Once you install it, open it and do the folowing...

 

I. Click the triangle

II. Select the second button (DirectDraw and Direct3D settings)

III. Select the Textures tab

IV. Under Surface format settings select for DirectX8+ applications

V. Set the amount of system memory to be allocated. The maximum is the half of your total system memory

 

 

 

[SuperKungFu]

yea the reason i haven't done so yet because i went into my BIOS, its slightly different compared to my friends. I guess he was running on a older BIOS from dell, and i had a newer one so i couldn't exactly locate it. That's why i brought up this question, because i was wondering was it even worth the trouble to do all this? Do you get a significant fps increase or load times?

[Pilotasso]

System RAM is much slower than dedicated graphics memory, if you expand GFX memory with system RAM youll be undermining overall system perfomance untill you load enough textures to fill up the GFX banks completely. But then again if such aplication is launhced on a laptop chances are it will PWN the CPU anway. I would revert back to dedicated memory on the GFX alone.

[emenance]

Read the link AGP alocation mb numbers is mem address space not actual pysical ram. Computer will start to use pysical ram after video card ram is full. The page file comes in somewhere......Just hit ctl alt delete and bring up task manager, play a game and alt tab out. Look how much memory is and was being used. ALOT.