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General discussion

DXDIAG Question

Feb 3, 2010 3:33AM PST

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) and when I run "Dxdiag" it shows my graphics card as having 4gb of memory when it only has 1gb. I'm just wondering why that is, and whether or not it's affecting anything. It's an ATI Radeon HD 5770. Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Some cards
Feb 3, 2010 4:40AM PST

Some cards use a hybrid system of onboard and shared system memory. This is likely what is going on here.

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Dddiag
Feb 3, 2010 11:46AM PST

If the 4GB is listed on the system page, it's showing the SYSTEM RAM, not video RAM. The video RAM is shown of the DISPLAY tab. The value here is more than the actual video RAM (by a lot!), because Windows calculates the maximum amount of system RAM it will allow the video to share. This is NOT the shared RAM you get when you have integrated video RAM(Intel integrated video), but RAM the video can use to store video data that can be rapidly transferred to actual video RAM. This is something akin to a video cache.