V-ram and On board Memory ?!

[PrivilegeYT]

I, was sitting here and this came to mind... If you run our of Video ram on your gpu will it compensate by using the ram you have on your ram slots ? So for example say if I tried to play BF4 with 4gb on ultra but DICE insist on using 8 GB .........., At some parts of gameplay where you do not have enough video ram on your gpu will it take some from the RAm on your MOBO ? I'm just curious. I hope I make sense lol

 

[BSOD BSTD]

no, the VRAM is what model textures etc are loaded into on the GPU. You cant use system RAM for this as the GPU needs the texture data for 'instant' access (hence the GPU has its own RAM). to use system RAM for this would slow the graphics processing down to the point where there would be no tangible benefit.

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

Yes the system will allocate some of the system memory as video memory as it is needed. You can actually see it in the nvidia control panel under system information. You can see there is a entry for shared system memory. You can't adjust it but it's there to show you how much it will take if it's needed.

However, when the video card has to resort to system memory the results are usually terrible. The video card spends too much time waiting for the ram which results in terrible frame rates.

 

[boju]

no, the VRAM is what model textures etc are loaded into on the GPU. You cant use system RAM for this as the GPU needs the texture data for 'instant' access (hence the GPU has its own RAM). to use system RAM for this would slow the graphics processing down to the point where there would be no tangible benefit.

Think he knows Vram is used first but if it runs out, his question was, what then? is system memory used?

Checkout Dxdiag>display, you'll see approx total memory is higher than the GPU's vram. It's just a backup nonetheless if someone was crazy enough to like that sort of performance.