I have just installed my new Sapphire HD 5770 1 Gig card. Now I am ruining Win7 Pro 32 bit and have 4 Gig on board memory. Now with the new card I would in affect have a total of 5 Gig. So as we know 32 bit only looks at 4 Gig so when playing games how is the memory now distributed or what effect does the additional 1 Gig on the ATI card have?
32bit is only read max 4GB of the memory. and you have VGA card 1Gb. what game that's u mean??
you can open the task manager when you run a game. and that's will show you how much memory used.
Actually no you don't. You still only have 4 GB of ram and now have a video card with 1 GB of ram on it, the two do not get added together.
With being on 32 bit Windows it means you now have less than 3 GB of ram available due to addressing limitations; 1 GB for the video card and whatever is required by the rest of the hardware. Pretty sure there is something in the tutorials about this but not finding it at the moment so,So as we know 32 bit only looks at 4 Gig so when playing games how is the memory now distributed or what effect does the additional 1 Gig on the ATI card have?
Coding Horror: Dude, Where's My 4 Gigabytes of RAM?
To stop it from stealing your RAM? Think about it, If the graphics card doesn't have to ask Windows for RAM but uses its own, then your memory and your OS isn' being bogged down by it.
For example: I have 3GB of Ram. I used to have an integrated Graphics card with 256MB dedictaed memory. As it was integrated, the graphics card was actually "stealing" 256MB from my Ram so I actually had 2.75GB Ram.
Now I have a Graphics card with 512MB but it is its own memory, so I have double the video memory, but I also have all my 3GB available. Graphics cards always need memory after all, but at least this memory now isn't being stolen away from my "proper" ram, freeing the memory for other stuff I need.
Least thats how I see it from my laymans point of view. (I know very little about graphics cards if I'm honest)
To answer your original question: the 1GB Graphics Memory will just be used for Graphics nothing else
No, Windows can only use up to 3 gig in your case because the 1 gig on your video card is "stomping" on the upper one gig of your 4 gig of system ram which is essentially disabled.
If you install the 64 bit version of windows then you will be able to use all 4 gig of system ram and the video ram will be mapped way up high out of the way.
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