Wierd video memory amount

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forrehmmnd

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 25, 2007
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Ok, i have an x850xt pe 256 mb video card, i was looking at dxdiag and it says i have a gig of video memory. Windows also reports it as 256 dedicated and 766 system. Is this wrong or is my video card really stealing 766 mb of my ram. its supposedly not a hyper memory card.
 
It doesn't steal your memory but is on reserve if you need extra memory from system memory for textures.
 
its not in use. i told you its on reserve for games that need more memory.
 
But it is in use, all the time, my memory usage is always around 820 mb at idle.
 
LOL it's not in use. You obviously have lot of programs running. Only time it uses the memory is when you play a game and it needs more texture memory.
 
... i the only thing i have running is firefox, xfire, and sometimes aim. all the programs are only using ~75 mb.
 
check your task manager. are you using vista? I'm on XP and i have 1.5gigs left for apps.
 
Thats how i came up with the amount, task manager, and yes, im using vista. an ill check the aperture size later, im kinda busy.
 
Just imagine if your card had no access to 700mb of system memory, then you'd have a real problem. Then where would your GPU store all those textures? So consider it a good thing.
 
forrehmmnd said:
... i the only thing i have running is firefox, xfire, and sometimes aim. all the programs are only using ~75 mb.
Click to expand...

Unlikely - Windows services (which you will also have running) are going to take up a LOT more than that.

In Vista's Task Manager, make sure you have "Show processes from all users" checked at the bottom.
 
From my own observations Vista seems to aim for approx 1/4 system memory usage on boot, if you have 2Gb it will load about 512mb of data, if you have 4Gb it will load about 1Gb of data (about 900mb for me)

It might be worth doing a screenshot of Vistas memory usage in task manager to give us a good idea of what is running. 820Mb isn't that abnormal for Vista with only a few apps running on a machine with 2Gb available you should be booting around about 500-600Mb and Vista will tend to keep frequently used dll's in memory even when the application that uses them is closed, for example firefox.

That memory definately is reserved and not in use.
 
That memory is paged in, reserved and on standby, but it's not actually in use.

It will be freed if you start to get towards 75% memory useage if a pagefile swap can be avoided.
 
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