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Originally Posted by JoshSB  Hey guys, I never really knew, but what is the difference between dedicated and virtual memory in regards to video cards (basically laptop memory cards).
The one I got says that it is 256MB, but I found out it is 128 dedicated and 256 with virtual (actually system info quotes 368 or so).
Anyways, thanks for the info guys. |
Dedicated memory is available only to the graphics and is just about as fast as you can get. Shared memory is system memory that is allocated to graphics. It is as slow as you can get. There are fancy marketing words like HyperMemory and TurboCache that are used to describe the types of architectures that graphics systems use to allocate memory. Hyper- and Turbo- sure do sound fast, but in reality, they are very bad things when it comes to gaming. When it comes to budget, they are very good, because it's cheaper to use existing system RAM (shared) than to manufacture VRAM (dedicated) chips.