Question About Video Cards. Do not Understand :(

Criminal Fetus · 08 Oct 2009

Ok I have this game Call Of Juarez - Bound In Blood, i'm only using this as an example, but according to the specs and system requirements lab, i can run this on max settings as seen below. BUT, my main question is that yes i know its an older card, but given that in x64 mode i'm allotted 2GB of video memory along with whatever i have to use as reserve for the system, so why is it that when i actually DO jump into the game i cannot? I have the latest shader model and meet everything, and yeah the card itself is only 256mb, but other allocated available memory should make up for it, right? Is there something i'm not doing to get it working correctly and why is it that my games only perform best when all anti-aliasing is turned all the way down and also shadows, particularly soft shadows? Are these reading from the site just not taking into factor the clock speeds on the card along with the few cores it has availble or what, i'm lost here. Someone please explain this to me :) thanks!

Also, does it matter i'm running 1080p rez?

Criminal Fetus · 08 Oct 2009

I tried the quote button but it didn't work lol. Not sure why...
Anyways, x64 allows more than 4gb to run in the OS correct? Well that 4gb is apparently being split up so that my system is running 2gb and i guess the 2gb that are free are being used somehow into my graphics memory. ..
Not sure i understand how it even works when i thought graphics memory was different but see here, both legible sources tell me i have about 2gb of leeway to play with on my graphics....is this wrong?

chrisf8657 · 08 Oct 2009

From the looks of it, you have 4GB of System Memory.
Your video card has 256MB of dedicated video memory.

My best guess is the "Shared System Memory" section probably means that if a game needs more than the 256MB the card has by itself, it can use system RAM to augment it, kinda like a "Virtual Memory".

Don't quote me on this I could be wrong...

This is new to 7 AFAIK so i'll research it.

sup3rsprt · 08 Oct 2009

Shared system memory is too slow to be useful in high bandwidth real-time graphics applications. The more RAM on a video card itself, the better (generally).

The 8600GT is a nice card for the mainstream segment but I don't think it's going to be fast enough to run this game at maximum details.

Criminal Fetus said:

Also, does it matter i'm running 1080p rez?

Sure. Higher resolutions requires more video memory and bandwidth (among other things).

NVIDIA said:

A Pixel Shader is a graphics function that calculates effects on a per-pixel basis. Depending on resolution, in excess of 2 million pixels may need to be rendered, lit, shaded, and colored for each frame, at 60 frames per second. That in turn creates a tremendous computational load.

The word "tremendous" there is an understatement!

Criminal Fetus · 09 Oct 2009

I'll give it a go with a lower rez then. But using a TV as my main and only monitor, there are very few resolutions that will actually fit to my screen and not cut things off. Most of the best fit are way poor resolution to my liking!