About vram and directx !

[racalriu]

Two days ago i upgraded my RAM from 1GB to 4GB, so i had to change from my beloved winxp to w7 so i can use all 4gb of RAM, tho anyways there are only 3gb usable, the rest are for bios and vram i think !
My 1st question is about my video card, old one, ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series, 256Vram with hypermemory ! I found this chart https://support.sapphiretech.com/presentation/article/article_faq.aspx whereif you look at 256vram-4gb ram u see that it can hypermemory up to 1536 vram ! I run dxdiag and i see that i have 1530 vram ! So if i run a game that requires more vram it will go up as 1.5gb vram ?

And i know my vcard supports hybrid crossfire, but i have no clue what that means, can some1 explain it to me and if i can use it maybe ?

Here are my PC specifications !

 

[stormy13]

racalriu, welcome to the Seven Forums.

What Sapphire calls "hypermemory" has nothing to do with the make or model of video card and everything to do with Windows itself. The memory is never actually used unless the video card runs out of its own memory, and then it will use what it needs from the allocated. This should help break down what some of those numbers mean,

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/89278-video-memory-virtualization-brief-guide.html

As far as having to install Windows 7 because you installed 4 GB of ram, seeing as you installed 32 bit Windows 7 you could have stayed with XP and still had the same 3 GB available. To take full advantage of the 4 GB of ram and have it all available you needed to install the 64 bit version of Windows 7. One thing about the whole 4 GB/ 64 bit Windows, the chipset of the motherboard has to support more than 4 GB of memory or it won't matter whether you install 32 bit or 64 bit. This should help explain that,

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

Hybrid Crossfire is where you can use a select few ATI/AMD video cards with certian AMD based motherboards that have AMD integrated graphics,

ATI Hybrid Graphics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[racalriu]

So basically, both w7 and xp supports only 3 gb ram , and what goes beyond 3gb is reserved , am i right ? Knew this for w7, not for xp tho!

About hypermemory, if i got it right from what you said, so it is true , when exceds max capacity of the video card, it gets more from the reserved ram memory and adds it to vram, more or less true !

I got M2V-MX SE motherboard from Asus, and it supports 64bit, but i looked into it and i see that 64 bit windows's have compatibility issues and i don't want to get 64 bit cuz i don't want to find out that my mb/vcard or anything else doesn't have a driver for 64bit version ! And yea, this motherboard supports max 4gb of physical ram !

Sorry for my english, yup i know it sux

 

[bobkn]

So basically, both w7 and xp supports only 3 gb ram , and what goes beyond 3gb is reserved , am i right ? Knew this for w7, not for xp tho!

It's true for 32 bit desktop versions of Windows. (It's more complicated for Server versions.)

If you wish to address 4GB or more, you'd need a 64 bit OS. (XP Professional X64 also exists, but not as a retail version.)