Found this on the web...
" To answer what is the role of memory, it is where all your vertex (geometry), terrain, mesh , texture data of your game is stored and GPU does computations on that. If there isn't enough space in GPU memory modern GPUs are capable of juggling data between VRAM (a dedicated memory portion of CPU RAM) and GPU RAM. PCIe bus have wide width of bandwidth that makes it possible to transfer huge amounts of data in no time. "
As far as the comment about Vid memory not being displayed correctly.....I agree...Game says I have 3GB, my card has 6GB.
Hi All,
From what I have noted AH is most likely reading the dedicated portion of a vid card's mem that is set aside for what is described above in Dobs post and is reported to Windows OS (where the game reads it from) as seen in the Windows dxdiag report. The in game used amount is most likely the amount of data that the game has generated and sent thru the OS to CPU to be processed and sent to\from system mem cache to the various devices to process (vid card, sound card, keyboard, mouse, joystick\HOTAS, monitor, etc). Looking at my box's Windows dxdiag the game reported vid card mem is an exact match to the dedicated vid card mem as reported in the Windows dxdiag. The rest of the vid card mem reported as shared in the dxdiag is most likely a cache that is set aside to promote data transfer across the PCI-E bus (have to have a buffer to allow data to stream to\from the system mem cache) w\o interfering w\ the rest of the operations as well as holding driver instructions for GPU operations and\or the infamous "swap file" which is the other part that is described in Dobs post in which a sector of system mem is set aside (addressed) by the OS to be used as "VRAM" if the dedicated vid card mem becomes full. This sector is usually set to the full amount of onboard vid card mem or "double" if you prefer. In most all cases it is the graphics frame buffer usage that eats up the majority of the onboard vid card mem that will cause the swap file to be used.
Now what I've posted here shouldn't be interpreted in any way that I'm making a statement that AH is reporting this accurately, only Hitech and Co can truly answer that. I'm only reporting from the evidence that I have seen to explain what is being discussed in this thread.
From looking at the various graphs from me using MSI Afterburner to record the vid card mem usage in game on my box they show anywhere from 1.2Gb to 1.8Gb of vid card mem usage during the game. I'm assuming that this is the actual vid card mem (part of the dedicated vid card mem as reported by Windows) being used for all the graphical work as well as the buffer to store the finished\sequenced graphics frames until they are called (flipped) to be displayed on the monitor, but it could also include the onboard shared vid card cache mem as well.....to date I haven't found any way of dissecting this to know which is actually which.
1 thing that I have noted from looking at the various dxdiag's that testers have sent to Hitech and Co is that it seems to change how this is reported once a vid card has more than 4Gb of onboard mem which says to me that this is sourced from the Windows OS coding as to how it handles the extra onboard vid card mem reported above a 4Gb limit and may have some influence on the numbers being reported.
Hope this helps........
PS--Hey Dobs, would you post the link to the article where you clipped this inset from? I would like to read it.
