Hypermemory HD 2600XT

[chaosinmind]

I purchased a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131066 ... It is a Powercolor Radeon HD 2600XT with 512mb of dedicated memory. People have reported it displaying 1GB of memory on the card instead of 512mb so I did some research. It appears the card uses Hypermemory even though it is not a low end card.

* Does Hypermemory actually "take" your system memory like shared memory? For example. If I have 4GB of DDR2 memory in my computer, will it display 3.5GB in system properties under windows?


* Or, does it just use my memory when needed like other high end graphics cards with dedicated memory.

 

[ViRGE]

The latter. And all ATI/NV cards can use system RAM if needed.

 

[chaosinmind]

That is what I thought, but could not be sure due to the badly worded descriptions all over the internet. The descriptions made it sound as if it used your memory as "shared memory". My old systems were AGP and before that all my systems had standard PCI and before that my systems had ISA slots I knew almost nothing about PCI Express.

It appears Hypermemory is just the new form of the "AGP Aperture" with different names for NVidia and ATI's variants on the PCIE architecture.

Thanks for the clarification.