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Stupid amounts of graphic memory

R

russell2002

Senior member
I have 2 graphic cards in one of my machines.

4MB on board. Works great.

I also have a radeon 9250 with 128mb.

It supports the same resolutions, colour depth and seems to the exact same job as the 4mb on board card does.

So whats all the other memory used for.
 
some games use a lot. and when a the card can hold it all, it goes onto system memory, which slows things up
 
if you aren't playing games it really wont make any difference, if you are though, so will soon realize how much the 4mb one sucks
 
Even for 2D applications, you should see an improvement in refresh rates at the highest resolution of your monitor (a 4 meg card might not be able to do 1600x1200@16million colors). Also, programs like Adobe Photoshop and others may see an increase from an older 4M card to a new card (even if the improvement is from a newer driver set)
 
Hi, Extra memory is for speed. The card can keep several screen fulls of video in it's memory and switch between them very rapidly. Jim
 
The huge amounts of memory are mainly for storing textures in 3d games as the card can access them faster than storing the textures in system memory . For 2d applications (what you mainly do) 124 megs or so of the 9250s 128 mb memory sit there unused.
 
Originally posted by: wafflesandsyrup
9250 cards are for entry level games, meaning they will crap out playing doom 3
Click to expand...
My dad completed Doom 3 with a 128mb 9200/900mhz slot a/384mb pc133 system 🙂
 
The amount of memory required for 2d is easy to calculate. First calculate the number of pixels on the screen. For a resolution of 1024 x 768 we have 786432 pixels. Now aply the color depth. If we run 32 bit color and there are 8 bits in a byte, we need 4 bytes per pixel. 786432 pixels times 4 bytes each is 3145728 bytes. divide by 1024 to get kilobytes...3072. Now divide by 1024 again to get megabytes. 3MB video memory needed.

Try 1280 x 1024...
1310720 pixels
32 bit color means 5242880 bytes needed. That's 5MB, so 4MB is clearly not enough to support 1280 x 1024 at 32bit color...we need an 8MB card or we need to drop down to 24 bit color which would only need 3.75MB

 
Originally posted by: Green Man
The amount of memory required for 2d is easy to calculate. First calculate the number of pixels on the screen. For a resolution of 1024 x 768 we have 786432 pixels. Now aply the color depth. If we run 32 bit color and there are 8 bits in a byte, we need 4 bytes per pixel. 786432 pixels times 4 bytes each is 3145728 bytes. divide by 1024 to get kilobytes...3072. Now divide by 1024 again to get megabytes. 3MB video memory needed.

Try 1280 x 1024...
1310720 pixels
32 bit color means 5242880 bytes needed. That's 5MB, so 4MB is clearly not enough to support 1280 x 1024 at 32bit color...we need an 8MB card or we need to drop down to 24 bit color which would only need 3.75MB
Click to expand...

Yes, but you forgot to incorporate any textures and such needed in a game. I gues they could just be loaded from the system RAM, however...
 
Originally posted by: SrGuapo

Yes, but you forgot to incorporate any textures and such needed in a game. I gues they could just be loaded from the system RAM, however...
Click to expand...

Doesn't sound to me like the OP is interested in gaming and I stated that the calculation was for 2d.
 
The other memory can be used for other pages, layers, frames, and be held by other applications. Any application that hits the GPU wants that memory for its stuff and that is not just games.
 
The massive ammounts of video memory which is used in games like Doom3 at ultra settings with maxout out eye-candy will much it all up fairly easily. Even with 512MB cards.

It's used to load the big fat files which hold all the visual data for a particular level to keep the game running smoothly.
 
Originally posted by: Green Man
Originally posted by: SrGuapo

Yes, but you forgot to incorporate any textures and such needed in a game. I gues they could just be loaded from the system RAM, however...
Click to expand...

Doesn't sound to me like the OP is interested in gaming and I stated that the calculation was for 2d.
Click to expand...

Ahh, I see. I am thinking of 2D games, which would use quite a few textures and such.For normal business/personal use (word processing, Internet, etc.) that is correct...
 
The OP isn't gaming or doing anything that requires 3D.

If you're not gaming or doing 3d, then integrated graphics will work for you. For serious gamers, people who do a lot of 3d-modeling, so on and so forth... they wouldn't be so happy about it.
 
Originally posted by: russell2002
It was my understanding that the radeon 9250 cards were designed graphics/business use and not for 3d/games.
Click to expand...


It is essentially the same chip(on a newer process to make it cheaper to produce) as the Radeon 8500, which was ATIs flagship 3d card several years ago. By today's standards it is pretty slow in 3d.
 
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