Go7700+ Vista+ 101.41 driver = !!!

So, I tried out some drivers yesterday, to find out which one boosted the performance of the Go7700 in my new A8js. Installing this driver did not boost the 3dmark06 score at all, in fact is dropped almost 150 points, but this driver did something else which I find pretty interesting as you can see in the pic.


it almost doubled the available graphics memory
Now I'm thinking the 3dmark drop could be caused by the card eating away my RAM, could this be correct? I use 2bg of RAM.
When playing BF2 I did notice less lag with this driver. I'm now seriously thinking off putting a 2gb So DIMM in my machine (so a total of 3 gb) to up the performance and take full advantage of this driver, I was wondering if that’s a good idea.
I found out that those 2gb cards are pretty pricy, so I'm also thinking of getting a 150x SD card to use with readyboost and see if that boosts the performance a little. Let me know what you think
SD card will be the first I try though, because that’s a pretty cheap solution "if it works"

ps: its the laptopvideo2go vista driver with modded inf, for those who want to do so testing for themselves

 

I have a hard time believing that a GPU with 1GB of video memory, borrowing 512MB's from system memory would make a difference in performance. I'm not at all surprised about the 150 point drop in 3dmark06.

 

well,

the normal amount is 512 and 256 so 768 which is already too much

 

My X1600 laptop also says that it has 1GB of memory because of vista. The extra 500 or so MBs of shared memory only robs your ram once your 512MBs of physical memory is used up. And I doubt that with 512MBs your system will ever even attempt to use the shared memory!

So there's no possible way that shared memory can slow down your system or your graphics power.

 

ok, thanks for the replys so far, if the shared mbs wont be used I'll be going for an other driver with less shared and a higher 3dmark score.

An other question on the shared part though, do you think future games like Crysis will have an advantage with this amount of shared video? If it's not going to be used why make drivers that up the shared video memory?

 

3Dmark scores don't mean much, just use the drivers with the best performance for the game that you actually play.

 

AFAIK, Go7600 and above don't use TurboCache.. How come this changes under vista? I didn't think sharing memory would be hardware dependent. Besides, even 512 MB is overkill for the likes of X1700, Go7700. Wonder what they'd do with the rest....

 

TurboCache is always enabled whether you really want it or not (and you actually do). The thing is that your graphics card can either use system RAM as video memory or it can page video memory onto the hard disk before it gets new textures and such. One is MUCH slower than the other, so TurboCache is always used. What you probably DON'T want is TurboCache to pre-allocate system RAM just for video memory since then it will be wasted most of the time.

 

Vista sets aside system memory

In the case of the 7700 which cant use 512 mb its a bad idea. Maybe it will be tuned someday.

 

That's weird, on my go7600 in vista in the 101.41 drivers, I have 512 dedicated + 255 share =S

Yours is...so much larger