Studio15 & ATI 3450

I have 4GB memory in my notebook, but it assigns 2GB to the gfx card.
Can I lower this? It's really a waste on Vista.

 

This is a pain and I have yet to find afix. It'd be appreciated if anybody knows how.

I run an SSD in mine and have set 1GB of 4Gb for a ramdisk. This greatly improved my performance but I run out of RAM during HD playback. I have no intent on gaming, just wanted a zippy little system for casual computer use and the occasional movie. The whole reason I got the 3450 was HD acceleration

Now when I play an HD movie it begins stutering a few seconds in. Totaly unplayable, windows low memory errors poppingup, and apps closing. Good fun!

 

Eh? What the hell are you doing to your system practal? :lol:

Mine plays 1080p x264 rips all day long on an external 1080p display, while rendering the normal desktop and other items with aero on on the laptop display, no problems at all. We're talking very high bitrate rips as well.

RuneFire, it should be dynamically assigned - i.e. it can use up to a certain amount, but wont be using that all of the time.

 

Wow i have 3 gb and it uses 1.5gb of memory. If i upgrade to 4 gb will I notice gaming performance better. SInce its gonna allocate 2gb to video memory.

 

It's not actually using that much memory, that's the amount it could theoretically use if it needed it. It's unlikely anything over 256mb would make a difference on a low-end card like the 3450. Maybe a little if you're running at 1920x1200, but it's unlikely you can play any games at settings that high. Even the fastest cards today only have 1gb of memory.

 

accoring to performace monitor, I have 4000mb total, 2200'odd in use, 17mb available.

this surely proves it's assigning 1800'odd to my f'n gfx card. 17mb for vista? that's ridiculious! please.... how do i limit this card, it's kicking my system in the nuts.

 

Vista handles memory a lot differently than XP. Instead of leaving all the extra memory unused, it does things like caching and prefetching to speed up performance instead of letting it all goto waste like XP does. As soon as an application needs the memory, it gives it to it. Here's a good article from a while back talking about this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

 

It sounds like you have other issues - during normal use that much memory WILL NOT be assigned to the graphics card.

EDIT: what does the cached figure read?

 

Mine is specificly because of the ram drive. I have 1024 singled out for the RAMdisk which houses a ready boost drive, ie cache, system temp, mymovies, and a couple of other small caches.

HD tach measures 1.76GB tranfer rate which just smokes anything. Anything using the ram drive is very zippy and it has stopped my SSD from studdering.

I have a clean install of Vista Ultimate and have used the assorted tweaks on OCZ's SSD forum(disable prefetch, superfetch, ect.). I have a few MCE apps installed, along with spybot, and yahoo messenger. System is specificly for web browsing and movie playback. I use sharky's vista codec pack and have enabled dxva enabled for 32-bit and 64-bit WMP. Thats all thats installed and its very basic with nothing resource intensive.

I build and sell low power consumption HTPCs. I have done close to 30 builds with this same software set-up on desktops and never ran into an issue. Highest shared memory I have seen on a desktop is 512MB though. Catalyst control center reports me as 2GB. I certainly know what Im doing and its just the hyper memory holding me up.

Prior to setting up the ram drive, I had no issues. This started after I made the ram drive but it shouldnt matter as the system still has 3GB of RAM to function. The easy answer is of course disable the ram drive but Im hoping to find a way to disable the shared memory first. For pure video playback, the onboard video memory should be more then enough.

My performance tab shows:
Total 4093
Cached 1818
Free 365

I have disabled all unused services and thats the best I could get