35-60% of my memory is MIA.. help me find it!

mushroomboy said:

What your saying is my 512MB GFX card gets mirrored? I only have 1G in the system right now, if I'm running a game that utalizes all 512MB of gfx, plus the 60% plus the 450MB the program is using... That's somewhere around 1.5 to 2G that's being used when I game.......... I know I've got a paige file but damn that doesn't have sound math there.

In reality the math is quite sound, Take a look at how “backwards compatible” hardware is, and how old ways of doing things have stuck with us for years long after they should have died a painful death.

your vid card does use 512Mb of memory, check out your Device Manager, first view hidden devices, then (Device Manager, View -> Resources By Type) , and look at all the little things taking up memory. Look at memory and IO each and every little thing in there is a bit of communication with another device if you map the ranges, you will find some gaps, and some intentional overlaps. All that is how your machine works.

I only see X GB of ram, but I have 4GB, what is wrong with my memory? - OCZ Forum
The computer reserves blocks of MMIO addresses for Video RAM, then buses, bridges, BIOS, then DRAM.

mushroomboy said:

. Basically if your theory held true if you had a 2G video card and 2G onboard then where is the computers ram!? Gone because you have to mirror the video cards image so it knows what to see?

yep, it happens in real life, you have a machine with so little usable memory in real life that it swaps to disk whenever you try to run anything.

Lets see what Microsoft says about memory mapping, and how it relates to usable memory.

The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed
For example, if you have a video card that has 256 MB of onboard memory, that memory must be mapped within the first 4 GB of address space. If 4 GB of system memory is already installed, part of that address space must be reserved by the graphics memory mapping. Graphics memory mapping overwrites a part of the system memory. These conditions reduce the total amount of system memory that is available to the operating system.
...
the total system memory that is available to the operating system is always less than the physical RAM that is installed

how about the mac-vs pc argument when apple had 64 bit support, and PC's 64 bit support sucked?

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 64-bits, Santa Rosa, and more
OEMs will encourage customers to upgrade a 2GB machine to 4GB, even though the usable RAM might be limited to 2.3GB. This is especially a problem on high-end gaming machines that have huge graphics cards as well as lots of RAM."

Go to Device Manager, View -> Resources By Connection . Then do the math for your system and see how much memory each item is sucking up.

Ask Dan: What's with the 3Gb memory barrier?
4Gb of RAM, and a pair of Nvidia's oddball 1Gb GeForce 7950 GX2 cards. Result: 56.25% of the installed memory absent without leave. You might as well have only bought 2Gb

Are all these people from the past so wrong about how pc hardware works? Or has win7 changed the fundamentals of how computer hardware works?

mushroomboy said:

It's independent, just as off board sound was created so the computer doesn't spend resources on sound. It's ingenious! adding external devices so that we don't have our CPU do the work!? What shall we call these devices? PCI!? GREAT!!!

yep, that's the physical structure/protocol but HOW do you move things around, where does the CPU write the bits that get moved? Where does the vid/sound card READ the bits from? It all has to get stored someplace...



computer does spend resources on sound, and other things, just not as much if the device is “hardware” vs “ a port on a stick”

Softmodem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Softmodem, or software modem, is a modem with minimal hardware capacities, designed to use a host computer's resources (mostly CPU power and RAM but sometimes even audio hardware) to perform most of the tasks performed by dedicated hardware in a traditional modem.

other things like non hardware raid, soft soundcards, USB , and other stuff uses the cpu/mem to get the job done. if your moving a few hundred gigs of data across a USB port you will see more CPU usage than if you used the same speed fireware, because 1394 does more "in hardware" than USB.

mushroomboy said:

[edit] Infact, what happens if you have a video card with more ram than the PC!? OMG We created a problem!

you can “lock up” the pc during boot (POST fail), or the vid card will not have “all” the memory on it in use.
if you want to try and see what happens when you have a vid card outstrip your memory, get a couple of Newegg.com - PNY VCQFX5800-PCIE-PB Quadro FX5800 4GB 512-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Supported Workstation Video Card - Workstation Graphics / Video Cards and be sure to disable swap (if it will let ya) and see what happens..

mushroomboy said:

Think outside the box. Sometimes the better answers are so crazy they just work.

see if your explanation, or my explanation works in real life, how does the data get transferred from one device to another? Lots of ways, one of those ways is the memory location.


once more, are all these people from the past so wrong about how pc hardware works? Or has win7 changed the fundamentals of how computer hardware works?

Even Wikipedia has some good stuff on this very issue

Memory-mapped I/O - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) and port I/O (also called port-mapped I/O or PMIO) are two complementary methods of performing input/output between the CPU and peripheral devices in a computer.

Framebuffer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
While framebuffers are commonly accessed via a memory mapping directly to the CPU memory space, this is not the only method by which they may be accessed.

Toms hardware has this very same question answered... in 2007...

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/243662-30-does-video-card-count-system-memory
tlreaves 07-17-2007 at 08:39:44 PM
To answer your question, yes the video card memory shows up as system memory in the strictest sense of the word.
…
But when you have 2GB of physical memory, and your video card has 768MB, and windows is assigning the rest to your sound card, pci busses, etc... there are no addresses left over for your extra RAM to operate. This is why 32-bit XP usually does not "register" more than 3.2-3.5 GB of physical memory.

It looks like we are getting away from what the OP ( jvincent08 ) asked, and it was, to paraphrase “I have 2gig, why is it getting all used up, the system reports only a small amount in use”, so I've created a different thread for talking about how windows (and the pc/x86 hardware world in general ) uses memory...
https://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/41866-win-7-mmio-video-device-memory-use-system-mem.html



Hopefully the jvincent08 is ok with the answers given for their own system. If not I'd be glad to continue here and deal with the issue he started off with. If he's fine with the explanations so far, perhaps he can change the title prefix to resolved.



I will reply to https://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/40369-35-60-my-memory-mia-help-me-find-3.html#post403828 in the new thread https://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/41866-win-7-mmio-video-device-memory-use-system-mem.html.

charles you seem to be filling your posts with random nonsense ...

like what boxes do u come accross once or twice a year that needed your magic touch of moving a dimm around to get them working ? , im pretty sure whoever put the rouge dimm in the machine in the first place will have a basic knowledge of troubleshooting , besides , ram is an extremely reliable part if a dimm is going to be faulty it generally shows problems straight after you install it

i thought the days of being able to buy ram so cheap and nasty that it would throw up errors


you say that you mentioned about triple dimms to help people who may look at your posts in the future?

but you do not explain in enough detail about what they would be doing plus the fact you clearly gave the actual person who was asking the wrong advice by suggesting he used triple dimms when infact his system would not accept triple dimms the way you are suggesting as his system is a dual channel NOT TRIPLE CHANNEL


so you are not only confused yourself by marketing posters you are passing on your lackluster "advice" like it was gospel

stick to asking questions , not giving answers

I work with servers, datacenters, and sometimes large cad/graphics workstations. You can have up to 40 1u servers to a rack, each server has 8 (or sometimes 16) slots. So you could have up to 640 swaps per rack. Upgrade a few racks a year (or a few dozen) , and you will encounter the same errors, its just basic stats.

im well aware of how dense racks can be i have worked with many over the years

your answer is still irrelevant your so called advice relates to a server enviroment , not a home user using a single core DESKTOP

also you will be using totally different ram for a server so why do you even make the comments you do when they have no relation to whats being asked ?

stop throwing different technologies and hardware scenarios that have nothing atall to do with what people are talking about all you are doing is confusing people who have came here to seek advice

First of all, you should NEVER run windows 7 on less than 2GB RAM, That's just plain experience. If you need cheap ram, go to www.ewiz.com, those are the guys I use.

You need to disable superfetch. This can be done by the following:
1) Start
2) Control Panel
3) Administrative Tools
4) Services
5) Right Click on Superfetch & choose Properities
6) Choose Stop, then Disabled
7) Choose OK
8) Reboot your machine

The second thing you can do if you have a low level of RAM, right click on the start button, choose properities, then customize. Un-check everything that has to do with searching, and finally choose don't search. In it's place, enable the run box. That will give you the same functionality.

Those two tricks worked well with vista, and should continue to work well with 7.

gordyboy said:

your answer is still irrelevant your so called advice relates to a server enviroment , not a home user using a single core DESKTOP

HUH? It is basic troubleshooting, sorry you don't understand that. The same troubleshooting that works on servers, also tends to work in the home environment. Card not working in one pci slot, put it in another, run out of slots, try a different machine. Same with USB , try different USB ports. If it doesn't work on any try a different machine. Got a handful of USB thingamajigs and you want to use that slot, try a different USB device. Works the same with memory...



Please explain, step by step, how the solutions I offered do not apply. I'd like to see where the error is.

gordyboy said:

also you will be using totally different ram for a server

The main differences between “server” and “desktop” memory are ECC and Chipkill (and features such as those), not “does the BIOS/system see it”. See Do I need ECC or non-ECC Memory?

gordyboy said:

so why do you even make the comments you do when they have no relation to whats being asked ?

You asked for it, remember?

gordyboy said:

like what boxes do u come accross once or twice a year that needed your magic touch of moving a dimm around to get them working ?