Vista Shared Video Memory

F

Faction

The Chairman
Joined
May 8, 2006
Messages
5,460
So ive searched for a solution without any answers other than " just deal with it"

Vista is taking well over 1GB of my ram and classifying it as SHARED VIDEO MEMORY.

people claim that it will only use it if it has to from what ive read..

Here is the thing.. I don't ever want it to use my system memory for video memory.There has to be a setting or a regedit or something... For those who are using vista I suggest you check this out for yourselves to see what is happening.

wtfnoreason.jpg

(this screen can be found under your vista score under print / show more details)

the part that really concerns me is when I look at my Task manager

wtfnoreason-2.jpg

under physical memory TOTAL is 3069

call me old school, but i want my system ram as my system ram, not have a gig as some sort of overflow for my video card, please only post respecful replies and only post if you actually know what you are talking about. Thanks.
 
my ultimate x64 install is the same. i have an x1950gt w/ 512mb ram, and 2gb, and it allocates like 1200mb for sharing with the system memory. i have read articles that this "feature" is to aid lower-end video cards (like my x300 w/64mb memory on my laptop) to display the Aero interface.

i'm not at my ultimate machine right now, however, i remoted into it and found that i do have the 2046mb of ram available in Task Manager, so I'm not as concerned with this as i would be if i had 4gbs like you do. still it would be nice to disable this "feature" for higher end video cards that don't need a crutch to limp on to run Aero.
 
That's normal. It does it on my machine as well. Blue Falcon sums it up pretty well in this thread.

SuperFetch dynamically allocates memory where it's needed when it's not caching stuff for programs. That's just showing you how much can be "set aside" for textures and models. It's kinda like memory management for AGP cards back in the day. Same principle.
 
yes, but as Faction pointed out, he now does not have the 4gbs of memory that he is supposed to have.
 
I just disabled superfetch, This is not the culprit, as it is still only showing TOTAL 3069MB of SYSTEM memory and 1262MB of SHARED video memory.
 
Have you checked your motherboard settings for memory remapping options? its likely that the graphics cards memory (2x512MB) is being mapped into the lower 4GB rendering 1GB of ram unuseable.
 
Faction said:
I dont believe this is true as it is showing all 4GB of ram, just vista is taking 1200MB of it and using it as video memory. correct me if im wrong.
Click to expand...

The system is showing that 4GB is installed, however the taskmanager shows that you only have 3GB available for use by windows (Total Physical memory). The shared video memory would be taken out of that 3GB.

That number (shared system memory) is the limit of how much memory CAN be used by the graphics adaptor and this is allocated into the available system memory on demand.

From the whitepaper linked here:
Shared system memory is a portion of the system memory that can be used by the graphics subsystem when needed. For discrete graphics adapters, this type of memory is often referred to as “non-local video memory”—that is, far from the GPU. The shared memory is available to other subsystems or non-graphics applications when it is not being used by the graphics subsystem. Thus, it is never guaranteed to be available for graphics because it could already be in use.
Click to expand...
 
so it does boil down to an issue with this board??

That makes sense, but others are reporting with this board no problems.
 
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