Possibly a reaaaaaally stupid question!!

Metaldave

Ok, here goes.. Is it possible to designate RAM from your comp to your graphics card?? And if so, how do you do it?

Webmaster

in laptops and some barebones it is common to find 'shared memory' so technically it's certainly possible. Especially if graphic card manufacturers would make the option available in cards for desktop PCs, I don't know of any that do.

In case of an integrated graphics card (such as in notebooks) it is sometimes possible to change the amount of memory that is used be the graphic card in the bios.

Ricka182

I do not believe you can, unless with maybe an older card. Some of todays videos cards have more Ram than some systems.

Metaldave

Thanks for your replys, the only reason I asked really was I was out with a client the week before last and his machine had 512 RAM but 32 was missing, and only 480 was showing up

Ricka182

Try running MemTest86. It's a very simple dos based program that can diagnose your memory, telling you if there are errors. I just had 512mb go bad, cheap memory I paid nothing for, so I'm not to pissed, but that does suck, memory is not cheap unfortunatly.

keenon

yes you can dedicate memory for video on a system.. it has to be done in the bios i have a few compaq computers here that have that feature

TheShadow

For on board video it is a definite, for graphics cards not directly as it is supposed to be transparent and not dedicated by specification.

80 to 90 percent of the current crop of cheap motherboards with on board video have no dedicated memory and share 8 to 64 meg with the processor across the AGP bus. Back when 8Meg was enough many motherboard makers stuffed the extra 8 on the motherboard but now much multimedia software, even screen savers refuse to install with less than 16Meg. That makes it cost prohibitive and lower system price points. Server motherboards seem to stick with ATI chip sets and 8 meg since you would not expect to be running much graphic stuff on them anyway. ATI and Intel used to support a special memory card that plugged in the AGP port if there was one to add dedicated memory for on board Video (GPU) chips