Will buying new graphic card share & occupy my system RAM?

B

BLaZiNgSPEED

League 1
25 August 2007
London, UK
Manchester United
I am planning to buy a new graphic card say a 512 MB.
I currently have an ATI Xpress 200 integrated Graphics card that shares my system memory. I normally have 1024 MB RAM but part of the ram is being used by the graphic card for video RAM. And i am thus left with only 960 MB system RAM.
But i am very confused here...
If I buy a 512 MB graphic card for my PC will it share my system RAM?
will it be 1024 system ram taken off 512 Video Ram= only 512 system RAM remaining?
Will it share my system RAM this is very important for me!
I want to know whether the graphic cards video ram is seperate, and not used up by system ram!
Because if it uses up my system ram then i will have to by another 1 gig RAM memory slot which will cost money.

Can someonep please clarify this information for me.

Thx
 
No it will not share your RAM if you buy a proper standalone graphics card, you just need to disable the onboard graphics card in your system bios, then turn off the PC, insert the new graphics card and then boot up your PC.

One tip I'd give you is be sure to download the latest drivers for the graphics card before you install it, that's better than using the driver which comes with the card which usually is out dated.

IMO RAM is pretty cheap these days and you really could do with 2gb anyways :)
 
As Placebo said, buy more RAM. No point having a 512MB graphics card if your system only has 1GB of RAM, you'll just create a bottleneck.
 
thanks for all the help. But all I need is a graphic card and 1 gig ram is sufficient for me I will only play Call of Duty 4 MW, FIFA 08, 09, PES 2008, 2009, and some other oldies:-pp

But is it possible to remove the integrated graphic card of my ATI Xpress 200? That way I can free and have the full 1024 MB RAM rather than the shares memory.

THX:))
 
Placebo said:
IMO RAM is pretty cheap these days and you really could do with 2gb anyways :)
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Mmmh.. it depends on the kind of RAM you're using.. If he's got DDR2 RAM I'd tell hikm to run buying a second GB of RAM.

If he has still DDR RAM, even if it's older, it may be too much expensive.

GoLdEnFiSh said:
But is it possible to remove the integrated graphic card of my ATI Xpress 200? That way I can free and have the full 1024 MB RAM rather than the shares memory.
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You cannot remove an onboard device (which seems to be your current graphic chip) but of course you will be able to turn it off via BIOS settings (refer to your motherboard's user guide to do so)
 
GoLdEnFiSh said:
ldies:-pp

But is it possible to remove the integrated graphic card of my ATI Xpress 200? That way I can free and have the full 1024 MB RAM rather than the shares memory.

THX:))
Click to expand...

Disabled in bios = removed.

With 1gb of RAM at least 256mb is being used for your OS, so at best for gaming you have 756mb that's actually being used for the game, that's really not much, even with a 512mb graphics card you're still going to have graphical elements such as textures that are using up your system RAM.
 
Placebo said:
Disabled in bios = removed.

With 1gb of RAM at least 256mb is being used for your OS, so at best for gaming you have 756mb that's actually being used for the game, that's really not much, even with a 512mb graphics card you're still going to have graphical elements such as textures that are using up your system RAM.
Click to expand...

That's not true I have 1024 MB RAM with 960 MB RAM remaining thats just 64 MB Video Ram that is being used from my system RAM.
Because 64+960=1024
How is the O/S occupying 256 RAM at the moment?!
 
What placebo said might be correct indeed.

Now you have 1024 MB of which 64 go straight to the video chip. So 1024-64=960.

Of these 960 MB you have, more or less 256 are "reserved" for the OS, you know they HAVE to be disposable to the OS, if not it slows down/hangs sometimes..
You may have some services running such as themes, zero, the indexing service (which I find useless and extremely resource-consuming), et caetera.. so 960-256=704 more or less.

This means you have more or less 700 MB free for the running programs to use.
 
Kleimann said:
What placebo said might be correct indeed.

Now you have 1024 MB of which 64 go straight to the video chip. So 1024-64=960.

Of these 960 MB you have, more or less 256 are "reserved" for the OS, you know they HAVE to be disposable to the OS, if not it slows down/hangs sometimes..
You may have some services running such as themes, zero, the indexing service (which I find useless and extremely resource-consuming), et caetera.. so 960-256=704 more or less.

This means you have more or less 700 MB free for the running programs to use.
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hmmm why would that be I already see 960 in the system properties general tab 960 if the O/S was occupying than I would've seen the 256 being shared.

By the way I have a DELL Laptop which is exactly 512 MB RAM and interestingly its not shares maybe because the graphic card in that laptop which is ati radeon 7500 is not sharing the memory as its a standalone graphic card as placebo said.

Can you tell me where can I check that information on my computer about the 256 MB RAM being reserved by the O/S/ Oh by the way my O/S is windows XP. isn't 256 MB RAM sharing meant to be for VISTA only?
 
GoLdEnFiSh said:
hmmm why would that be I already see 960 in the system properties general tab 960 if the O/S was occupying than I would've seen the 256 being shared.
Click to expand...

I see now why you've been thinking wrong, you're completely missing the point by looking in the wrong place, no harm :)

System Properties/General merely shows you the theoretical maximum RAM available to your OS, the relevant place to look is in the windows task manager, or if you're cool and funky like some you'll have a slightly different task manager.

I have 2gb ram in my PC, usually I have a few apps set to start with windows (Emule, Utorrent, Miranda, Kaspersky, SmartDefrag & Skype), however for this little experiment I disabled all of them and rebooted, here's my list of running apps and ram free:

process_explorere.jpg


Not too many things running right? Most of them are either default windows things or they're stuff needed for my graphics card drivers or sound card drivers.

system_information.jpg


Now look at my free ram (middle section under physical memory/available) available is only 1.56gb, so after a fresh reboot, windows is using up almost half a gig of my ram. Ram is being used by drivers, running apps, background services, all the little elements that go into running an operating system, now I could go crazy disabling every service possible on my PC and raise that default available ram stat a bit higher, but at the end of the day the OS will still use some of my ram, I'll never get a full 2gb for a game I want to play.

And that's the point we're trying to make to you, check yourself, press CTRL+AT+DEL to open Windows Task Manager, click the performance tab, how much available physical memory do you have?

Here's mine after I started up those default apps (Emule, Utorrent, Miranda, Kaspersky, SmartDefrag & Skype) as well as opening up Firefox with 3 tabs.........

task_manager.jpg


Down to 1.3gb ram now........

The good thing is that Windows can be quite smart and when you start a very intensive app or game it will try to suck ram away from everything else using it to free it up completely for the game, however it won't be able to get everything back, it won't for example be giving you the 960mb you were hoping for.
 
Thank you for the nicely presented explanation:DD

Ok I thought of another graphics card that is ATI Radeon HD 2400Pro / 256MB / PCI Express x16 / Graphics Card

Will this be a good graphics card for Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 and call of duty 4 modern warfare?
As I know COD 4 requires 128 video RAM and 256 for the reccomended.
The ATI Radeon HD 2400 is one of the supported graphics card for PES 2008. It has 4.0 shader model and 256 MB RAM so I suspect that this will run on high quality.
But I do not know whether PES 2009 will need 512 MB video ram for high quality. But can someone confirm this?
Graphics Processor: ATI Radeon HD 2400Pro
Memory Installed: 256MB GDDR3
Interface: PCI Express x16
180 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
64-bit DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
40 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 16 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative vertex/texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture & Z/stencil cache designs
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10
Shader Model 4.0
Description



Witness firsthand DirectX 10 gaming and HD features without the prohibitive price tag.

The ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO provides next generation hardware that promises immersive high definition gaming for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 with easy CrossFire multi-GPU upgradeability to run the hot titles of today and tomorrow. Delivering a fully loaded HD feature-set including support for ATI Avivo HD, HDMI connect ability, HD Audio and Blu-ray / HD DVD decoding via Universal Video Decoding technology, the Sapphire 2400 PRO exceeds the demands of the performance hungry Media PC. The Radeon HD 2400 PRO with its robust hardware offerings such as: the much anticipated ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO GPU, support for up to 256MB of onboard memory, 64-bit memory interface, silent passive cooling, and PCI Express native support will provide the pixel pounding muscle to drive the feature rich Windows Vista 3D environment and increase productivity. When paired with Sapphire industry leading innovation in hardware, there is little doubt that the Sapphire 2400 PRO will lead the industry in best features and value.

Will this work well on latest games?
 
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Simple first step for video card research is to google "video card name review", then you get something like this: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_2400_Pro

The review doesn't benchmark COD4 maybe too old for that? But you can see it does benchmark Stalker and the results are really not impressive at all. Couple more reviews here and here looks to me like a semi-budget card when it was released and hasn't aged well.

What's your maximum budget? Maybe someone will be able to find you a better card for in terms of bang for your buck, I've just ordered an XFX Geforce 9800 GTX 512mb http://www.i4u.com/section-viewarticle-430.html obviously that's a whole other end of the spectrum though and is costing me £165
 
Placebo said:
Simple first step for video card research is to google "video card name review", then you get something like this: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_2400_Pro

The review doesn't benchmark COD4 maybe too old for that? But you can see it does benchmark Stalker and the results are really not impressive at all. Couple more reviews here and here looks to me like a semi-budget card when it was released and hasn't aged well.

What's your maximum budget? Maybe someone will be able to find you a better card for in terms of bang for your buck, I've just ordered an XFX Geforce 9800 GTX 512mb http://www.i4u.com/section-viewarticle-430.html obviously that's a whole other end of the spectrum though and is costing me £165
Click to expand...

My budget is £50-£60 card. But I do not want to spend too much because I do not think its worth to upgrade with a very strong graphics card on an intel pentium 4 processor and win XP computer.

If a graphics card such as this does the job well, why not get that instead? cos very few games require 512 MB video RAM so the 256 will do good. If this can do me the job for a few years that will be GREAT! My old integrated ati xpress 200 works almost well but it lags and skips on some places in the game.
If a card like the HD 2400 solves these problems with lag and smoothness I am happy with it.
 
Placebo said:
For your budget I'd go with "Radeon HD 2600 XT"

http://shopping.kelkoo.co.uk/ctl/do...=60&sortBy=totalprice&priceMin=40&priceMax=60

http://www.ebuyer.com/search/?page=...10&intStoreID=2&intCatID=48&intSubcatUID=2206

http://search.ebay.co.uk/Radeon-HD-...3QQfromZR40QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ34QQgbrZ1QQsbrsrtZd
Click to expand...

What is specially better about that card compared with the HD 2400? And its also not in the supported list of graphics cards for PES 2008 will it work?

I have PCI-Express X16 slot on my PC will the Radeon HD 2600 XT be good enough to work with my PC?
What about PSU. Do I need to buy a stronger PSU Watt to run graphic cards such as this or the HD 2400?:w00t:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=19024&source=Kelkoo here it says its for Vista it doesn't mention XP does that mean that it won't work with XP?
 
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GoLdEnFiSh said:
What is specially better about that card compared with the HD 2400?
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http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd2400/specs.html
http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd2600/specs.html

2600 is a faster card than 2400, in some aspects double or more, 2600 supports full HD video playback, 2400 doesn't.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/graph...ATI-Radeon-HD-2600-XT-2600-Pro-and-2400-XT/p7
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/465/9

In gaming the 2600 is 25%-50% faster minimum.

GoLdEnFiSh said:
And its also not in the supported list of graphics cards for PES 2008 will it work?
Click to expand...

Sure. You understand this is the kind of question that Google was invented for? ;)

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=PES+2008+Radeon+2600&btnG=Google+Search
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=185091


GoLdEnFiSh said:
I have PCI-Express X16 slot on my PC will the Radeon HD 2600 XT be good enough to work with my PC?
Click to expand...

Yes. As you should see from reading the link you yourself just posted.


GoLdEnFiSh said:
What about PSU. Do I need to buy a stronger PSU Watt to run graphic cards such as this or the HD 2400?
Click to expand...

I don't know, you forgot to mention what PSU you have now.......


GoLdEnFiSh said:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=19024&source=Kelkoo here it says its for Vista it doesn't mention XP does that mean that it won't work with XP?
Click to expand...

No it means whoever put that stuff on the site is a moron, the OS' supported by the 2400/2600 is defined by what drivers ATI release, it's compatible with XP don't worry :)
 
GoLdEnFiSh said:
No I have 250 watt PSU.
Is that enough?
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250 Watts is extremely low for anything at all, I'm surprised you can do anything with that PC without the power blowing off ;)

IIRC I have a 600Watt PSU, but then I have 4HDD's & 1DVDRW amongst other things :)

You might be ok, you might not, hard to say, if not you should get a 350Watt PSU as minimum I'd say.
 
Placebo said:
BTW did you check your free RAM in task manager as I advised? I'd be curious to see what it shows for you after a fresh reboot :)
Click to expand...

I have 1% CPU Usage sometimes goes to 0% Total physical memory (k)916844 available 533380 System Cache 272876.

This information is based after i had increased my 128 Video RAM now I have 896. Gameplay performance has improved:))

I also ordered the Ati Radeon HD 2400 PRO. I hope I didn't make a mistake but it seems to be a good card for games like cod 4, crysis, pes 2008, etc dunno until I aint got it though.
 
So as you can see, out of your 1gb ram you actually only have 533mb available for a game to use, hence us all suggesting you should upgrade to 2gb.........

You ordered the 2400 not the 2600? Hmmm seems to me that was a pointless attempt to save a couple of £, well your choice.
 
Placebo said:
So as you can see, out of your 1gb ram you actually only have 533mb available for a game to use, hence us all suggesting you should upgrade to 2gb.........

You ordered the 2400 not the 2600? Hmmm seems to me that was a pointless attempt to save a couple of £, well your choice.
Click to expand...

Hmmm yes I ordered the 2400 I know its not the best but will I be able to run games on high quality such as PES 2008 or 2009?
It has pixel shader 4.0 my ati radeon xprss 200 integrated card only has 2.0 and 64 mb video ram so isn't this not better?
 
You certainly won't be able to run COD4 in high quality on it, no idea how well optimised recent PES' are compared to early PC versions but considering Fifa09 will now feature almost next gen graphics you won't be able to run that in high detail either, it's probable even with the 2600 you wouldn't be able to run these games in high detail, especially if your CPU is as weak as you indicate, but the 2600 would have meant you could most likely run the games in higher detail than the 2400, just look at the benchmark links I provided.
 
Placebo said:
You certainly won't be able to run COD4 in high quality on it, no idea how well optimised recent PES' are compared to early PC versions but considering Fifa09 will now feature almost next gen graphics you won't be able to run that in high detail either, it's probable even with the 2600 you wouldn't be able to run these games in high detail, especially if your CPU is as weak as you indicate, but the 2600 would have meant you could most likely run the games in higher detail than the 2400, just look at the benchmark links I provided.
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My Pc isn't that weak/ It has intel pentium 4 HT processor 1024 ram 80 gig harddrive.
3.06GHz one of the highest from the fewest you can get from any PC in the market;))
But I managed to run pes 2008 on high detail with kitserver softwre and it run almost ok but since it requires 3.0 I have only 2.0 with my integrated graphics card. And only 64MB video which can also be 128.
I dont see why cod4 cannot be played on high quality when it requires 128 mb video ram only I will have 256 with the 2400 and it also has pixel/vertex shader of 4.0 so it must run. And with the tweak of kitserver for PES the performance will improve.
 
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You understand that a P4 3.06ghz is a 6 year old processor right? In PC terms that's obsolete, most people are using dual/quad core processors these days ;)

I appreciate you're not into running high quality modern games like Crysis and such, but COD4 is a very demanding game, here's some benchmarks from the demo http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/call_of_duty_4_demo_performance/page3.asp the lowest card on there is the Geforce 7900GT which gets 20FPS, that card is roughly twice as fast as the ATI 2400, so you're gonna be lucky to get 10FPS on high settings.

COD4 requirements:
Minimum Requirements

* Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
512 MB RAM (768 MB RAM for Windows Vista)
8 GB of free hard drive space
Video card (generic): NVIDIA Geforce 6600 or better or ATI Radeon 9800Pro or better

Recommended Requirements

* 2.4 GHz dual core or better is recommended
1 GB RAM for XP, 2 GB RAM for Vista is recommended
3.0 Shader Support recommended, Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better
Click to expand...

With your ATI2400 and P4 3ghz you're slightly over minimum requirements, so there's no way you'll be able to play the game on high settings with everything maxed out.

As you see the X1800 is a recommended card, you've bought a card that's 50% slower than the X1800, the ATI 2600 on the other hand is 25% faster than the X1800. As per these tests: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_3850_Xtreme/14.html
 
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Placebo said:
You understand that a P4 3.06ghz is a 6 year old processor right? In PC terms that's obsolete, most people are using dual/quad core processors these days ;)

I appreciate you're not into running high quality modern games like Crysis and such, but COD4 is a very demanding game, here's some benchmarks from the demo http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/call_of_duty_4_demo_performance/page3.asp the lowest card on there is the Geforce 7900GT which gets 20FPS, that card is roughly twice as fast as the ATI 2400, so you're gonna be lucky to get 10FPS on high settings.

COD4 requirements:


With your ATI2400 and P4 3ghz you're slightly over minimum requirements, so there's no way you'll be able to play the game on high settings with everything maxed out.

As you see the X1800 is a recommended card, you've bought a card that's 50% slower than the X1800, the ATI 2600 on the other hand is 25% faster than the X1800. As per these tests: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_3850_Xtreme/14.html
Click to expand...

But I will use 640 x 480 resolution so its not a problem for me. I use that resolution with almost every game I play with my current integrated ati xpress 200.
everything else high only resolution in its lowest. I play FIFA 08 on high detail only resolution on 640x480. pes 2008 is about the only game that I play with 800x600 resolution:lmao:

So if I play on that type of resolution can I play quite smoothly and lagless during online and offline on most games?

I don't have problems running games like fifa 08 on high setting but there is a liability that fifa 09 won't work with my current ati radeon xpress 200 card very well due to the next-gen graphical improvements. But I hope the 2400 is much better than my integrated card since I see it as one of the supported graphic cards for pes 2008 and also I saw it in euro 2008 game.
so most probably it will work with pes 2009 and fifa 09, well I hope;))
 
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