Will graphics card use system RAM?
I have a 1gb card and as games are going nowadays, I think it's safe to assume that in a few years 1gb won't cut it. When a game uses all the VRAM on the card, will it start using system RAM? If so, will it be as effective?
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Only on-board or APU Processors use system RAM. Video cards have their own dedicated RAM built in.
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Hi Jonathan. I'm a senior computer science student, and I hope I can answer your question. No, games do not use your System RAM for graphics in addition to VRAM on the external graphics card. Your games do use System RAM, but not for video graphics.
When you have a dedicated video card from AMD or nVidia, your games will only use whatever resources possible from that video card to do the image processing and physics. If you wanted to use higher resolution textures in your games, you may see a "bottleneck" or a "throttle" with only 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. Games like Skyrim, Crysis 3, and Guild Wars 2 use high resolution textures which can really benefit from having 2-4GB of graphics memory, but the bandwidth (speed) of that memory also plays an important role on performance.
AMD's APU's (Accelerated Processing Unit), however, have a hybrid crossfire mode by using a dedicated graphics card such as the AMD Radeon HD 6670 in addition to an APU such as the A10-5800k. The APU is a processor with integrated graphics built in, which uses the System RAM. When the hybrid crossfire is enabled, it allows the graphics cores in the A10-5800k and the Radeon HD 6670 to work together to boost overall graphics performance.
Since the APU uses System RAM, and the Radeon HD uses its own dedicated graphics RAM, I think this is a special situation where both are being used. Not exactly what you're referring to, but it's a similar situation that I thought would be interesting to explain.
No, graphics cards come stock with their own ram... most cards use GDDR5 ram. its built into the card