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my computer thinks i have more vram than i do

Bozebo

Bozebo

Bozebo

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Joined
10 Oct 2008
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Hi, I am running 2x 9800gt cards in sli, each with 512MB gddr3 ram, but dxdiag says i have 2 GB of vram. and it could be causing the crashes I get when running demanding games; screen goes black for a while then it catches up about 5 seconds later - or crashes indefinately.

Any suggestions?
 
Pilky01 said:
Claimed.
Click to expand...

What?

Anyway - its a standard feature of Vista and a bonus of the new display driver model in Vista. Basically the GPU in Vista has become more of a general purpose unit that anything can use. An extension of that is that your physical memory is added to the VRAM of your card. Stops any app running out of memory (for the most part), and therefore stopping a crash.

Think of it like high-speed virtual memory for your graphics card.
 
Forget the DX-Diag, look in Performance and Information Tools under your Vista Experience Score.







So if needed it will take 1791MB of my 4096MB (4GB) of System Memory and add it to the 768MB of GPU Memory to give it a total of 2559MB GPU Memory.
 
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Yes, with sli disabled in the nVidia control panel the games run without failing but I dont get the high fps of course.

Thanks for explaining it, I can see the correct 512MB figure in "Performance and Information Tools under your Vista Experience Score"; 5.9 for everything except ram :/ (I presume when you run sli it doesnt add the vrams together - that would be odd). But now I still have the problem of games crashing with sli on. It's interesting because I can run source engine games (havnt tried orange box) no problem but some less demanding games like dawn of war and age of empires crash like crysis and cod4 do. Yes, I ticked dual video cards in cod4 - with it off my problem is more frequent.
And by the way I updated the drivers the day I installed my gpus and again yesterday just incase.
Incase it matters, I have 4GB of ram which is supposedly "sli enabled" which I think I heard somewhere just lets the bios automatically tweak some things or something.
I am quite sure there aren't heat problems in my gpus, Vtune doesn't say they go above even 45 C and speedfan puts my cpu at about 35 C.

Pilky01 i'll be your slave forever...... :/
 
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corsair tx750W - plenty o' power?

edid: I was thinking, should i return my 2 cards and pick up 2 with 1 GB each? it'l only cost me £35 more in total
or, should i get one card thats more upmarket than that... (though the gtx, gx2 and the 2xx series are too high up >_<) and then when it goes down in price buy my second one
 
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