Dedicated Vs Virtual

JoshSB · 04-23-2007, 07:55 PM

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.

darksideleader · 04-23-2007, 09:07 PM

i think its an extra 128mb your getting from ur ram.

JoshSB · 04-23-2007, 11:43 PM

Does it function any less than regular memory?

SpikedCola · 04-23-2007, 11:52 PM

Definately theoretically slower, but whether you will actually notice or not... I guess youd have to compare, side-by-side, 256mb of dedicated video, and 128mb dedicated + 128mb virtual.

JoshSB · 04-24-2007, 12:15 AM

Hmm, oh well, not to big of a deal, because it takes advantage of 256 MB of virtual memory including its base 128 it allows for over 300 MBs of total memory for the card anyways.

Not a big deal, not a gaming laptop anyways.

ShackledPhoenix · 04-27-2007, 06:03 PM

Sorry I have to point this out, it's bugging me. you're thinking of dedicated and Shared memory for the video card.

Virtual Memory is using the HDD as system memory.

Shared memory isn't very effective as it has a much slower bus speed than the memory typically used for graphics cards. It also steals from system memory. 99% of the time more than 128MB shared will do nothing for you.

Besides that, anything requiring more than 128MB of video memory will typically be too hard for the processing speed of that Graphics chip anyways.

Kubel · 04-27-2007, 07:41 PM

Quote:

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.

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