Does increasing VRAM mean less System RAM is available?

ed79 · 13 Oct 2011 at 13:28

I've currently got a 1GB Gfx card and 4GB of system RAM (Win 7 x64). If I were to swap for a 2GB or 2.5GB Gfx card, would this reduce the amount of system RAM available? Thanks.

Final8y · 13 Oct 2011 at 13:34

ed79 · 13 Oct 2011 at 14:37

Good, thanks!

Rofflay · 13 Oct 2011 at 17:54

It wont reduce no but graphics cards still like to grab some system memory to cache textures as well so having more ram is useful.you can see it in GTA IV with 8GB v 4GB apparantly check my other thread on this.

My 8800 GTX 768mb grabs 3gb ram in idle mode so i found that amusing when i have only 4gb ram.I got 16gb now waiting for a nice 3GB keplar card in 2012.8GB is the sweet spot though i am just gambling on 64bit games becoming a bit more popular.

gazjones105 · 13 Oct 2011 at 17:58

Rofflay said:
It wont reduce no but graphics cards still like to grab some system memory to cache textures as well so having more ram is useful.you can see it in GTA IV with 8GB v 4GB apparantly check my other thread on this.

My 8800 GTX 768mb grabs 3gb ram in idle mode so i found that amusing when i have only 4gb ram.I got 16gb now waiting for a nice 3GB keplar card in 2012.8GB is the sweet spot though i am just gambling on 64bit games becoming a bit more popular.

will it grab the systems "physical memory" or "paged memory?"

ive got 16gb of ram so ive set my page file to 800mb only (as using an ssd)

AndrewNR · 13 Oct 2011 at 18:22

will it grab the systems "physical memory" or "paged memory?"

ive got 16gb of ram so ive set my page file to 800mb only (as using an ssd

With 16GB I don't think you need to worry.
I thought must graphic cards were point-to-point?

Rofflay · 13 Oct 2011 at 18:27

gazjones105 said:
will it grab the systems "physical memory" or "paged memory?"

ive got 16gb of ram so ive set my page file to 800mb only (as using an ssd)

hmm im not sure it could be physical memory as paged is physical memory no? Pagefile needs to grab physical memory to page if that makes sense.I dont see why even with an SSD which i have also (m4 drive) you would touch page file settings to 400mb? ram is surely faster than your SSD?

TBH i was going to leave everything at default with 16GB of ram + SSD so it can cache.It would have like 8GB free to do such things.

Crazy...

gazjones105 · 13 Oct 2011 at 18:42

the only reason i lovered the pagefile size was that with having 16gb of ram, the ssd uses 16gb of space for pagefile on my 120gb crucial m4.

as space is precious, i lowered the pagefile so ive restored 15.2gb of storage space just by lowering the pagefile.

ed79 · 13 Oct 2011 at 19:44

Rofflay said:
It wont reduce no but graphics cards still like to grab some system memory to cache textures as well so having more ram is useful.you can see it in GTA IV with 8GB v 4GB apparantly check my other thread on this.

Yeah I went back to trying to play GTA4 with 2GB system RAM and it really didn't work very well!

My OP was just to check that if I put a 3GB Gfx card in that I wouldn't end up with just a few 100k of my 4GB free once Windows had loaded.

Vince · 13 Oct 2011 at 20:07

Rofflay said:
hmm im not sure it could be physical memory as paged is physical memory no? Pagefile needs to grab physical memory to page if that makes sense.I dont see why even with an SSD which i have also (m4 drive) you would touch page file settings to 400mb? ram is surely faster than your SSD?

TBH i was going to leave everything at default with 16GB of ram + SSD so it can cache.It would have like 8GB free to do such things.

Crazy...

Paged memory is a section of the hard disk that is reserved for functions which physical memory would normally do should there not be enough available. As such you wouldn't want your games paging to disk all that often if you can help it as even with an ssd you won’t get close to the speed and bandwidth available through ram.

A dedicated video card will not page to ram, it will however pull cashed files from physical memory or paged memory, essentially if you have enough memory to deal with the demands of the game without paging to disk then your not bottlenecking the speed at which you can supply data to the graphics card. As a result your game should run smoother.

edit: To answer the op windows 7 x64 will allow different memory amounts depending on the configuration, I believe this is how it stacks up:

Starter: 8GB
Home Basic: 8GB
Home Premium: 16GB
Professional: 192GB
Enterprise: 192GB
Ultimate: 192GB

xsistor · 13 Oct 2011 at 20:20

On a 32-bit system, yes it would.

On a 64-bit system the memory bound is much higher, so it won't.

Rofflay · 14 Oct 2011 at 09:07

Vince i have a question for you then as im confused a little.

A dedicated video card will not page to ram, it will however pull cashed files from physical memory or paged memory, essentially if you have enough memory to deal with the demands of the game without paging to disk then your not bottlenecking the speed at which you can supply data to the graphics card. As a result your game should run smoother.

Thanks mate so let me get this straight then, i have an m4 256GB and 16GB of ddr3 on sandybridge yea? So if i turn off my page file then will the GFX card will stop using HDD and pull cached files from ram instead? Like i said above my 8 series with under 1gb vram likes to grab near 4GB of ram and i dont even have my 580 set up yet.

I want it to cache as much as 4GB as preloading textures and holding them is a good thing on 16gb of ram but whats not good is having it come from disk even if that SSD has 500mb reads.So what do u reccomend in this case? disable page file or just leave everything alone? I only bought this much ram as it was on offer for dirt cheap and i like the idea of never having popup no matter what monsterous x64 game comes in two years time.

Vince · 14 Oct 2011 at 10:32

Rofflay said:
Vince i have a question for you then as im confused a little.

Thanks mate so let me get this straight then, i have an m4 256GB and 16GB of ddr3 on sandybridge yea? So if i turn off my page file then will the GFX card will stop using HDD and pull cached files from ram instead?

With 16gb of ram it is incredibly unlikely that you will be paging to disk, unless of course you are running some really memory intense application as well as the game. If you turn off the page file then you do indeed force the system to use physical system memory without the use of the page file.

Rofflay said:
Like i said above my 8 series with under 1gb vram likes to grab near 4GB of ram and i dont even have my 580 set up yet.

In this instance its not the card specifically that is eating up your ram but simply the demands that the game puts on the system, regardless of the type of card you have what the system loads into memory (prefetches) will remain the same (providing the texture detail etc is the same). For example you load up gta4 and the textures are loaded into memory ready to be pushed to the graphics card for processing. Regardless if you have an older 8 series or a 580 there is still 4gb of textures sitting in memory the only difference is the rate at with the card can read the texture and process the textures, this is where the architcture of the card itself will make the difference.

Rofflay said:
I want it to cache as much as 4GB as preloading textures and holding them is a good thing on 16gb of ram but whats not good is having it come from disk even if that SSD has 500mb reads.So what do u reccomend in this case? disable page file or just leave everything alone? I only bought this much ram as it was on offer for dirt cheap and i like the idea of never having popup no matter what monsterous x64 game comes in two years time.

Personally I see lots of issues with custom set page files, many people will recommend dissabling the page file to force the system to use physical memory, this has its advantages in that ram is up to 40 times fasted than the hdd but you need to make sure that your not going to run out of physical memory. In this case though you have 16gb of memory so your unlikely to be cashing anywhere near that much into paged memory if cashing anything at all.

Do you have another HDD in the machine?

I would be tempted to leave the page file as system managed but move it onto a drive that is not being used by windows. The advantage of this is that a) the page file is still there should something try and load up your memory beyond 16gb (unlikely unless your hosting a sharepoint farm or similar). and b) A drive not being used by windows will likely respond quicker to page requests than a drive which is using windows.

Either way with 16gb of memory I wouldn't be spending time looking at paging as the thing thats slowing your system when gaming, what is more likely is that the graphics card is bottlenecking as it tries to keep up with the demands that the system is putting on it.

Also remember that at idle your system will be using 3gb as windows post xp now aims to use all system resources that are available to it in order to keep a smooth system, much of the cached memory (roughly 3gb in 7 during normal usage) will be prefetch, ie applications that you run often pre loaded into memory so that they can start faster should you decide to run them. As you start your game resources will be released by windows in order to be used by the game.

gazjones105 · 14 Oct 2011 at 11:03

VinceB1 said:
Do you have another HDD in the machine?

I would be tempted to leave the page file as system managed but move it onto a drive that is not being used by windows. The advantage of this is that a) the page file is still there should something try and load up your memory beyond 16gb (unlikely unless your hosting a sharepoint farm or similar). and b) A drive not being used by windows will likely respond quicker to page requests than a drive which is using windows.

i also have an ssd (main drive) and a hdd (storage for music)
if we set the page file on the hdd only, will the system automatically page from the ssd to the hdd if it exceeds the 16gb memory or are they treated as individual drives?

hope ive explained that correctly...

cheers.

gazjones105 · 14 Oct 2011 at 11:11

this is what i mean. this is how ive got mine...

Vince · 14 Oct 2011 at 11:11

gazjones105 said:
i also have an ssd (main drive) and a hdd (storage for music)
if we set the page file on the hdd only, will the system automatically page from the ssd to the hdd if it exceeds the 16gb memory or are they treated as individual drives?

hope ive explained that correctly...

cheers.

If you set the page file to the hdd rather than the SSD then your system will page from memory to the hdd should you fill up 16gb of physical memory. This leaves the SSD free from paging and available for other disk i/o tasks.

In basic terms the ssd will load game data into memory, if there is more data than there is memory then the system will begin to page memory to the HDD rather than back to the SSD.

gazjones105 · 14 Oct 2011 at 11:16

cheers for this info vinceB1. so basicly, if people have got an ssd and a hdd, it would make sence to page to the hdd as this not only saves valuble space on the ssd, but also reduces small read/writes?? (if the memory exceeds system memory of course)

Vince · 14 Oct 2011 at 11:19

gazjones105 said:
cheers for this info vinceB1. so basicly, if people have got an ssd and a hdd, it would make sence to page to the hdd as this not only saves valuble space on the ssd, but also reduces small read/writes?? (if the memory exceeds system memory of course)

Yes indeed.

gazjones105 · 14 Oct 2011 at 12:48

happy days.