Video Card Stealing Ram

drich290195 · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:08

As u may have noticed from another post i am loosing 1GB of ram from my system somewhere, i think i may have found it my ATI Radeon X1950 Pro may be stealing it see where it says shared memory my question how do i get it back

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Cleeecooo · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:28

Get more RAM?
Upgrade GPU?
Your card clearly can't handle windows aero so it seems a new one would be a wise choice.

kylew · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:28

Are you using 32bit Windows 7?

kylew · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:29

Cleeecooo said:
Get more RAM?
Upgrade GPU?
Your card clearly can't handle windows aero so it seems a new one would be a wise choice.

What? An X1950 is way more than enough for Windows 7 Aero. :confused:

Firenze · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:31

kylew said:
What? An X1950 is way more than enough for Windows 7 Aero.

+1 I've had to resort to my old X1950 Pro while OCUK do something with my 5870. Aero is fine.

drich290195 · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:33

no 64bit windows i just want the ram back only have 3.2GB usable out of 4GB is it using it or is this unrelated

kylew · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:34

Firenze said:
+1 I've had to resort to my old X1950 Pro while OCUK do something with my 5870. Aero is fine.

My laptop's crappy X1100 is more than enough for Aero as well.

kylew · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:35

drich290195 said:
no 64bit windows i just want the ram back only have 3.2GB usable out of 4GB is it using it or is this unrelated

I would think it'd be unrelated.

layte · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:36

kylew said:
What? An X1950 is way more than enough for Windows 7 Aero.

Depends on the res and amount of open windows. Aero is currently using 485MB of video memory on my system. I've seen it go as high as 900MB.

(Firefox 4 and the GPU accelerated render engine doesn't help things..)

Cleeecooo · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:42

layte said:
Depends on the res and amount of open windows. Aero is currently using 485MB of video memory on my system. I've seen it go as high as 900MB.

(Firefox 4 and the GPU accelerated render engine doesn't help things..)

This is what i meant. Depending on what your settings are eg. If you have slideshow and custom colour then it needs a lot

kylew · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:43

layte said:
Depends on the res and amount of open windows. Aero is currently using 485MB of video memory on my system. I've seen it go as high as 900MB.

(Firefox 4 and the GPU accelerated render engine doesn't help things..)

Something must be borked for you because with my 5870 running 3 24" monitors with loads of windows open, I get nowhere near that. For desktop stuff, the memory footprint is incredibly small.

Cleeecooo · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:50

kylew said:
Something must be borked for you because with my 5870 running 3 24" monitors with loads of windows open, I get nowhere near that. For desktop stuff, the memory footprint is incredibly small.

I have around 300mb.

Rroff · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:51

Even with multi monitor and loads of windows I don't see more than ~80MB VRAM used by Aero...

That shared system memory isn't a dedicated amount IIRC its the max it can possibly use.

layte · 14 Mar 2011 at 23:48

kylew said:
Something must be borked for you because with my 5870 running 3 24" monitors with loads of windows open, I get nowhere near that. For desktop stuff, the memory footprint is incredibly small.

Firefox 4 is the main culprit, but even before that I had seen 400MB+ VRAM usage.

kylew · 15 Mar 2011 at 00:40

layte said:
Firefox 4 is the main culprit, but even before that I had seen 400MB+ VRAM usage.

Something's borked then. Nearly a gigabyte of VRAM usage from windows desktop is just utterly unrealistic.

Ch3m1c4L · 15 Mar 2011 at 10:19

thats unrelated. Every system has it on vista/7. It is mostlikely a setting in your bios that you have to turn on PAE or something? If its not turned on in the bios then the OS cant use it. Other options could be that you are in fact using win7 32bit etc.

layte · 15 Mar 2011 at 16:13

kylew said:
Something's borked then. Nearly a gigabyte of VRAM usage from windows desktop is just utterly unrealistic.

No not really (also, as I said it is FF4 with the GPU accelerated rendering which pushes it beyond 400MB). Open up a lot of windows on a high resolution display (none of this 1080p rubbish) and watch the VRAM usage rise. I see similar memory usage on OSX also, which can cause a performance bottleneck as Apple love to skimp on the VRAM so you get juddering when it swaps between system and video memory. (OSX VRAM usage can be monitored using the OpenGL monitoring tool which is part of Xcode)

Anyway, this is not related to the OP's issue, just a bit of an interesting aside.

FrenchTart · 15 Mar 2011 at 16:20

layte said:
No not really (also, as I said it is FF4 with the GPU accelerated rendering which pushes it beyond 400MB). Open up a lot of windows on a high resolution display (none of this 1080p rubbish) and watch the VRAM usage rise. I see a similar memory usage on OSX also, which can cause a performance bottleneck as Apple love to skimp on the VRAM. (OSX VRAM usage can be monitored using the OpenGL monitoring tool which is part of Xcode)

I'll check this out on my eyefinity setup later...It seems hard to imagine that you're right but I'll test before I make any snap judgements.

layte · 15 Mar 2011 at 16:28

FrenchTart said:
I'll check this out on my eyefinity setup later...It seems hard to imagine that you're right but I'll test before I make any snap judgements.

How do you monitor VRAM usage on ATI setups? I know when I had a 4870x2 it was not really possible. Have ATI added the neccessary API to allow programs like Afterburner and GPU-Z to detect this? Also it seems that the window size has a big impact on memory use, a single 2560x1600 window seems to use a lot more memory than two 1280x1600 windows, a bizarre foible of the DWM I guess.

Also no FF4 = 300-400MB while using FF4 = VRAM nomnomnom

FrenchTart · 15 Mar 2011 at 16:32

That was about to be my next question. I've just been looking for tools to find out vram usage without much luck.