This may seem a silly question but what difference does the memory make that comes with a graphics card?

Question

I used to have a Nvidia Geforce with 256 mb memory graphics card but changed to a ATI Radeon 9250 with 128 mb because i dont like having fans on my graphics cards.The ATI was a lot cheaper and had a heat sink too but what does the memory actually do and how does it improve things? I have Windows XP with a 768 mb RAM.Thanks all

Answer 1

It means the card can use the memory to run graphics rather than relying on your machine's regular memory.

Answer 2

Hello. The memory in graphics card is not for saving. It is for graphics and images processing. The memory in graphics card is a lot faster than the Ram memory, so having a graphic card with a lot of memory is very good for games or graphics applications.

Answer 3

Your friend was correct.

GFX cards have onboard memory to take the strain off of the RAM in your motherboard. It saves this memory for things like video and games. Meaning your system has more memory to store the programs.

The more RAM the better performance. You were better off with the 256mb Graphics Card.

You can get 256 GFX cards with smaller fans, just have a look about =]

Answer 4

The memory on the graphics card is used to process the video on the screen.  With more memory on the card there is less swapping with the system memory.  This is a bid factor if you are gaming or video editing.

Answer 5

It essentially gives the video card space to store intermediate data, just like the computer's RAM. If you have more of it, it can hold more things and does not have to regenerate them all the time. This makes all graphics applications faster (up to a point). 3D games can use a lot of video memory for storing many objects to render, so having more video memory especially helps them.

Answer 6

It's for performance.

The memory is for several things - the display buffer, where the dots on the screen come from.  Depending on the number of colors you are using, it could be up to 64 bits per dot.

The graphics processor also needs memory to do 3D rendering and translations.

For graphics intensive games, it also is used to calculate complicated 3D textures, anti-aliasing and perspective.

Answer 7

The memory allow high quality graphics (textures) to load locally on the video card, rather than using the machine's ram. Two reasons:

1. the ram is dedicated for graphics only, so is not allocated for anything else. There's no waiting for allocation because its all for textures.

2. vram tends to be a faster kind of ram from that in the motherboard. Motherboard may use ddr or ddr2. Vram tends to be ddr3, 4, 5 in performance cards. (ddr2 in cheap ones)

In 2d graphics you probably wont use much over 64meg for normal day-to-dat desktop stuff. When you start manupulating large image files, but particularly when rendering textures in 3d (ie gaming) is when larger amounts of ram is utilised.