Put up my video cards capacity

[flashlight001]

I have a video card that has memory of 1.8GB, but i found out that only 128 MB work. What is wrong i have a good motherboard, and a good ram, why is so low.

 

[SpidersWeb]

What model is the video card?
Does your computer have on-board video as well? e.g. a monitor plug next to your USB/keyboard plugs rather than only being on the card itself.

 

[daft]

is your OS 64 bit? if not, that may be what's preventing it

 

[SpidersWeb]

is your OS 64 bit? if not, that may be what's preventing it

Incorrect.
The 64 bit memory addressing issue occurs at 3.75Gb.
You only need a 64bit OS when you have 4Gb or more of system memory (RAM). He is talking about video memory.

 

[slickncghia]

post your full system specs and why you think its only using 128mb please

 

[richardscott]

Incorrect.
The 64 bit memory addressing issue occurs at 3.75Gb.
You only need a 64bit OS when you have 4Gb or more of system memory (RAM). He is talking about video memory.

actually thats wrong with a 32bit os can only address 4gb of memory and that includes ram and gfx cards

plenty of websites you can look yourself as i cant be bothered to troll the internet to prove im right 😛

 

[richardscott]

wouldn't surprise me if it were a onboard gfx chip and he needs to change the bios to up the amount of memory as i dont know many gfx cards with 1.8gb of memory, also on a side note its always the gfx memory takes away from system memory anyway not the other way arround

 

[SpidersWeb]

actually thats wrong with a 32bit os can only address 4gb of memory and that includes ram and gfx cards

plenty of websites you can look yourself as i cant be bothered to troll the internet to prove im right 😛

I beleive you, it's all good. Never really been an issue since 4Gb on video cards isn't seen so it's a topic not bought up often. I was 50/50 on weither the video RAM addressing was OS or GPU reliant.

Still though, wont happen until 3.75Gb.

 

[uncfan_2563]

I beleive you, it's all good. Never really been an issue since 4Gb on video cards isn't seen so it's a topic not bought up often. I was 50/50 on weither the video RAM addressing was OS or GPU reliant.

Still though, wont happen until 3.75Gb.

well yeah but lets say he has 3gb of system RAM and 1.8 gb vram, thats 4.8 gb of RAM in total that needs to be used. 32bit cant do that

 

[SpidersWeb]

well yeah but lets say he has 3gb of system RAM and 1.8 gb vram, thats 4.8 gb of RAM in total that needs to be used. 32bit cant do that

I understand you're thinking here but Video RAM and system RAM are seperate (physically and architecturely), they have their own independant 32bit address space, they are completely seperate of one another.

For example here at work, my machine has 4Gb RAM, 1Gb video RAM, and running Vista 32. I've got 3.75Gb RAM in use, and 1Gb of video RAM to use.

Richard was correcting me on a technicality, that you wouldn't be able to have more than 3.75Gb of video RAM in a 32bit OS environment. This still wont be the cause of the OP problems unfortunately. I think either he's confused or the card is faulty.

 

[uncfan_2563]

hmm thats weird. i always thought they have the same address

 

[SpidersWeb]

Edit: I've done some research and you are actually correct!
I am talking total bollocks, I went over to MSDN and did some reading.

My sincere apologies, this very well could be the reason!
It also means that my work video card is being limited to 256 without me knowing (not that I need it).

Yeah so sorry about that, rather embarrassing, I was dead certain that wasn't the case.

Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7

 

[razor512]

If a videocard is onboard or has turbo cache or relies entirely on shared system memory then the video memory is dynamically allocated.

last thing you want is a intel videocard using 1.8GB of system memory out of your 2GB, windows would not like running off of 200MB of memory that much