# Video RAM



## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

Is there a way to see how much video RAM is used/free at any given time?
I'm curious because I want to know if I need to upgrade my video card or not.  If it's not spilling into system RAM then I don't want to.
It's a Radeon x550 with 256 MB onboard.  But I think it's enough for my purposes, as i'm not really a gamer at all.

Plus I got 2 GB of RAM.  But THAT is a product in VERY short supply.  I really should upgrade to 3 GB


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## Rostam The Grey (Aug 4, 2007)

Seems like there was a Direct X diagnostics program bundled with Direct X that would do that. But I don't remember how to use it... If you google Direct X Diagnostics it might help.


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

I've been looking all day and can't find one.


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## Rostam The Grey (Aug 4, 2007)

C:WINDOWSsystem32dxdiag.exe

I thought it told you, but it doesn't apear to. But it might be able to help you discover the problem?


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

No, you misunderstand Rostam.

There is no 'problem' i'm just seeking to improve performance, and I need to find out what would be most effective.  Thus, I need to see how much video memory I have free, at any given time.  Like you would for RAM in windows task manager.

Dxdiag doesn't have the info I need.


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## ADF (Aug 4, 2007)

This what you are looking for?


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## Rostam The Grey (Aug 4, 2007)

Janglur said:
			
		

> No, you misunderstand Rostam.
> 
> There is no 'problem' i'm just seeking to improve performance, and I need to find out what would be most effective.  Thus, I need to see how much video memory I have free, at any given time.  Like you would for RAM in windows task manager.
> 
> Dxdiag doesn't have the info I need.



Ya, sorry, like I said, I thought it told you how much RAM you were using. But it doesn't. Have you looked through your card properties? Go to Display Properties in the control panel, click the Settings tab and go to the advanced button. Maybe the custom properties dialog has something that will help you? I looked through mine but couldn't find the RAM usage on the laptop. My older machine does have a help dialog and the current usage listed though.


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

I have.
I'm a rather advanced user.  I can confirm that if there's a way on my computer, then it's not one widely known.


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

Thanks, ADF.  That SEEMS to work.
But the readings seem extremely off..

It says Second Life only uses 10 MB of VRAM, and Postal 2 uses 41.1?

That just seems incorrect..


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## Ron Overdrive (Aug 4, 2007)

Most of SL's textures are stored locally in system RAM. Also if you're looking to improve performance I'd look into the Omegadrivers or the Xtreme-G Wildcat drivers instead. ATI isn't known for good driver support for anything.


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

Those would be useless, Ron.

I'm trying to conserve system RAM by determining if some of the programs I run sap any while i'm running other, more work-related memhogs.

I need to know if my games are flooding outside of the 256 MB or not.


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## ADF (Aug 4, 2007)

The tool does seem a bit weird; I figured it reported the reverse, as in you have 10mb ram left as opposed to in use.

I could be wrong of course.


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

Well, if SL RAM's it all then I wouldn't be surprised.  SL is poorly programmed and incredibly unstable, buggy, and frankly it would be a big joke if it wasn't so customizeable and unique.

Also, if it's in reverse, then being outside a game is more resource intensive than being in one!  XD  .00 used in 1280x1024x32@75.

I guess it works, but i'm not sure it works _right_ or if my understanding of VRAM Cache Structures if faulty.
I'm gonna try the Doom3 demo now to see what happens.


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## Janglur (Aug 4, 2007)

Yeah, it has GOT to be wrong.  It said Doom3 is only using 8 MB video memory, while Quake (the original) used 10.4.

BS


Next?


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## Rostam The Grey (Aug 5, 2007)

It might just be reporting video ram used by your computer system and not the video ram used on your card. Sorry my suggestions didn't help. Is your screen skipping or anything strange happening? Or are you just checking?


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## Janglur (Aug 5, 2007)

As I said, there is no problem.  I am simply trying to see how much video memory programs are using.


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## CyberFoxx (Aug 5, 2007)

Trying to figure out how much onboard videocard RAM (VRAM is actually a type of RAM, BTW) is currently being used by programs is an adventure in futility, especially on a Windows machine. With the way how DirectX is designed, textures will always be stored in one of two places, System RAM and Video RAM. The placement of the textures will be swapped as fast as the video card and system memory bus can handle. This is due to efficiency, if a texture isn't be used, toss that sucker into System RAM just in case we need another texture for the next frame.

Starting with good ol' Win2K (Possibly even in Win98.), the management of the GDI interface was starting to get offloaded to the videocard, thus using videocard RAM even when not playing games. Also, the card itself may buffer "trivial" stuff in it's onboard RAM as well, such as frames from video. This is so it can do processing on those frames. Most newer nVidia cards do this with certain codecs, MPEG2 for example.

And then there's the framebuffer itself. What, you didn't think that everything gets drawn directly to screen did you? Nope, it gets tossed into the framebuffer after all that processing/3D/etc stuff is done, then sent to the monitor. Double buffering and triple buffering will increase the amount of video RAM being used.

In the end, if you got a decent card on a decent bus (AGP and up) and decent drivers, you shouldn't really concern yourself if you are "Running out of Video RAM" because it's being managed as tightly and as fast as possible. And trust me, if you arn't doing any major gaming or running Windows at extreme resolutions, 256MB is good enough for now.

Wanna know what it's like when you do run out of Video RAM? Well, the nVidia Binary Drivers for Linux have a wonderful bug that causes Beryl/Compiz to start rendering windows as black boxes once video RAM runs out. This is due to the fact that nVidia actually forgot to include a check to see if there was any video RAM free on the routine that Beryl/Compiz uses. The fun part is when you start closing unused windows, and those black boxes start to render, it's kinda weird watching it.


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## Janglur (Aug 5, 2007)

No offense, but..

That was a wonderful bit of nerdia.  But it still doesn't help me answer my question.  I suspect that my apps do, in fact, end up with higher demands for VRAM than the card can handle.  However, I want to confirm this before upgrading, as an upgrade would be expensive, increase energy consumption and heat output, and potentially cause a headache.
And yes, I know VRAM is an actual type of RAM, but Video RAM is VRAM shorted, so the use of context-sense is imperative.  VRAM was the successor to WRAM (Window RAM, not related to Microsoft's OS) and was itself succeeded by SGRAM.
I am a hardware nerd.


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## Ron Overdrive (Aug 6, 2007)

Janglur said:
			
		

> No offense, but..
> 
> That was a wonderful bit of nerdia.  But it still doesn't help me answer my question.  I suspect that my apps do, in fact, end up with higher demands for VRAM than the card can handle.  However, I want to confirm this before upgrading, as an upgrade would be expensive, increase energy consumption and heat output, and potentially cause a headache.
> And yes, I know VRAM is an actual type of RAM, but Video RAM is VRAM shorted, so the use of context-sense is imperative.  VRAM was the successor to WRAM (Window RAM, not related to Microsoft's OS) and was itself succeeded by SGRAM.
> I am a hardware nerd.



What CyberFoxx was saying is simplified in one of his paragraphs:



			
				CyberFoxx said:
			
		

> In the end, if you got a decent card on a decent bus (AGP and up) and decent drivers, you shouldn't really concern yourself if you are "Running out of Video RAM" because it's being managed as tightly and as fast as possible. And trust me, if you arn't doing any major gaming or running Windows at extreme resolutions, 256MB is good enough for now.



Simply put, don't worry about it. Your card isn't that old and between the drivers & hardware design you won't run out of video memory any time soon unless the memory management in the drivers fail for some reason. If anything you should look more into system memory if you're concerned about memory usage.


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## Janglur (Aug 6, 2007)

Well, i'm trying to eliminate all use of the swapfile.  I want my HDDs spun down as often as possible.  Which requires a lot of RAM.
I have 2 GB system RAM presently, and a PCI-E x16 ATI Radeon x550 with 256 MB (+256 shared, 512 total)


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## Ron Overdrive (Aug 6, 2007)

Ok so effectively you have 1.786 gigs available for the system. What you might want to look into is an extra gig or two (ram is pretty cheap these days) and either disable the swap file all together (not really recomended) or create a 1 gig swap file on a ram disk. That would eliminate writing to the swap file on the hard disk.


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## Janglur (Aug 6, 2007)

What's the point of using RAM for a swapdisk?  All it would do is reserve that RAM, wasting a bit, and then put the swapfile in RAM anyway.  Which is what disabling the swapfile does.  It just does it less efficiently.


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## Ron Overdrive (Aug 6, 2007)

Well that would eliminate the swapping to the hard disk all together, but adding more system ram will reduce writing to the disk. Also setting the swap file to a static size would reduce writing as well as the system wouldn't spend time dynamically resizing the swap file.


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