AHIII Dxdiag Usage

[Pudgie]

Hey All,

Since AHIII is (supposedly) a 32-bit game software, does it even use the vid card's 64-bit driver coding any?

Am wondering about this due to a noticeable difference between the 2 dxdiag files on my box concerning the setup of the vid card's onboard mem usage...............

On the 32-bit dxdiag file the vid card appears to not have a swap file addressed in system mem......seems that this is done within the total onboard amount of vid card mem alone whereas on the 64-bit dxdiag the vid card appears to have had a swap file created for it in system mem...........

Been wondering this for some time.

Is the 32-bit dxdiag file the file that we need to pay the most attention to concerning AHIII's performance?

Appreciate any insight on this.

 

Attached are the 2 dxdiag files for my box that shows what I'm getting at.

 

[Skuzzy]

See the "Shared Memory" amount for the amount of system RAM the video driver can use.  No, not all the graphic operations are done in the video card memory for 32 or 64 bit.  They both (32 or 64) use system RAM for many operations.

[Pudgie]

See the "Shared Memory" amount for the amount of system RAM the video driver can use.  No, not all the graphic operations are done in the video card memory for 32 or 64 bit.  They both (32 or 64) use system RAM for many operations.

Thanks, Skuzzy for the explanation.................. ...

So the shared mem amount in the dxdiag's is the amount of system mem Windows allocated to the vid card driver's interrupt request.
So in the 32-bit dxdiag this looks to be following the 4Gb mem limit (system mem allocated to replace the amount of vid card mem being used by the GPU to get to 4 Gb), correct?

So from what you've laid out here it appears that the vid card driver\Windows uses some logic to "decide" on whether the particular graphics operation being executed will be done\stored in dedicated mem or the swap file.

So once again it really doesn't matter all that much of the amount of dedicated vid card mem onboard a vid card past a certain minimum amount...............

 

[Chalenge]

I think the MB ram that is less important, it's where the game elements are passed on to the VRAM. The VRAM is important for resolution, AA, DSR, and so on. As the GPUs become more powerful the amount of VRAM will grow in importance.

[Skuzzy]

VRAM is VERY important.  It is, up to, a few magnitudes faster than system RAM.  There is a reason the built-in video support, from Intel, runs so poorly, and the lack of dedicated video RAM is the primary reason.

[Pudgie]

All the attributes that both of y'all are mentioning I know to be true & right.

What I couldn't see or understand is why a swap file is being created\used if a vid card has sufficient\more than sufficient dedicated VRAM onboard w\ sufficient VRAM bandwidth available..........

Skuzzy answered that.

Looking at the MSI Afterburner graphs of the ingame mem usage while playing AHIII (1.2Gb-1.4Gb) on my box and assuming my GPU\driver needing 1Gb mem this puts "total mem usage" around 2.2Gb-2.4Gb....just a little over 1\2 of the 4Gb total onboard VRAM available.....and w\ a total VRAM bandwidth of 512Gb\s across a 4096-bit bus I would believe that nothing would be swapped out to system RAM.....

But then Skuzzy's statement concerning Intel's (AMD's as well) built-in video support has just triggered it for me..........shoulda known that Windows would've been written to accommodate this as a standard so thus everybody has to comply w\ this "standard" for graphics\video to function correctly within Windows environment thus all vid card drivers "must" request a swap file to be created.

The question then for me to ask is this:

Does a game software HAVE to make use of this swap file for Windows to be happy, or just that a swap file EXISTS is enough to make Windows happy then a game software is now free to process graphics\video as it needs\wants to process within dedicated VRAM then only swap out to system RAM once ALL VRAM is addressed\used?

I don't mean to be prying into anything proprietary concerning AHIII, just wanting to understand all this from a generic position of a 32-bit game software making use of VRAM vs system RAM processing graphics using my box's setup as an example platform from the window of the dxdiag's..........

Thanks for the responses!

 

[Chalenge]

If you are attempting to understand the swap file in order to manage it yourself? Stop. Let Windows manage it. I understand the lifetime issue with SSDs has people worried about life expectancy, but you will replace your system LONG before that SSD wears out because of the page file.

[Pudgie]

If you are attempting to understand the swap file in order to manage it yourself? Stop. Let Windows manage it. I understand the lifetime issue with SSDs has people worried about life expectancy, but you will replace your system LONG before that SSD wears out because of the page file.

Hi Chalenge,

No, not worrying about SSD usage here at all......that's in the bag.
Graphics\video swap file is created in system mem 1st and I got PLENTY of that so concerning SSD involvement in this is not my concern or the reason for this topic.
I've actually been entertaining the advent of moving up to 32Gb of low CAS system mem lately, but this is really overkill for my current usage as the 16Gb of low CAS system mem I currently have installed is more than enough for some time to come.....but I AM curious as to how Windows will respond (and thus software running on it) to having even more system mem available to use........

 

I'm wanting to understand the video\graphics swap file usage w\ 32-bit game software within Windows OS.......and yes I am looking into this for graphics card performance reasoning alone, not SSD's.

Y'all have answered most of this for my curiosity...........

I've always held to the adage that any process, regardless of what it is, can only be fully exploited\used when it is fully understood.
This applies IMHO to the consumer side of computing as well as the engineering side of it as it is the engineering that a consumer needs to fully understand to then make full use of it on the consumer side to achieve the results desired.....

And since computing is a passion that I have had since high school days that I didn't have the opportunity to go into then, I'm making up for this in my olden years........

    

Thanks for the responses!

 

[Chalenge]

I have always thought that the address area that Windows sets up is controlled by DirectX, and therefore nothing more than about 8GBytes of memory is going to be useful. Programs like Premiere Pro or 3DS Max can benefit from 16GB, or even 32GB, but very, very few games (if any) would need that much. You could probably do some math to find out what the optimum memory size would be, but it would require knowing how many textures and of which size are being used (along with the associated LOD textures) and the vertex counts of models (along with the associated LOD models). It's probably just too much to try and calculate for every game and program you might play/use.

Memory is cheap, so experimenting is practical.

[Skuzzy]

Applications have no control over how the shared system video memory is used.