Does my Video Card swallow 1GB of system RAM?

Here's what Nvidia Control Panel says about my GeForce Go 7400 in Vista
Total Available Graphics Memory.... 1071MB
Dedicated Video Memory................. 64MB
System Video Memory...................... 0MB
Shared System Memory............... 1007MB

Does it mean that 1GB of my system RAM is now taken by the video card and not available for any other use?
Will shared system memory be helpfull at all when playing games or watching Blu-Ray/HD-DVD? I mean if a game or an HD movie requires 128 MB Video RAM and I only have 64MB, does it mean that I can compensate that by sharing another 64MB with the system RAM?

 

I am not too familiar with GeForce Go video cards but this configuration does seems odd. Yes, shared system memory is reserved for video card cache in addition to the dedicated video memory. So your system will have less memory for general purpose, which may lower overall performance. There should be a place in your Bios to adjust this amount.

Faster graphic core would benefit from more memory but I doubt 7400 can utilize 1GB of RAM. 300mb should be plenty. The general requirement for playing HD and Blueray on a integrated GMA is 250mb video memory running around 800Mhz and a dual core processor running 2.0Ghz. Whether your 7400 can play HD or Blueray or not should be found on nVidia site. But I am sure reserve anything above 300mb video memory won't help it in any way. It more related to GPU core.

 

Turbocache (memory sharing) technology borrows your system memory from your graphics card when it's needed and returns it after use. You don't have to worry about the system RAM being permanently reserved by your video card.

 

No

On nVidia's turbocache technology, your video card would only eat up system ram when it needs to, which is basically just when you're gaming. It could share UP TO 1 GB RAM if necessary. Therefore, the general performance of your computer will not go down when you're not gaming.

If you plan on gaming and doing other stuff at the same time, then lowering the maximum amoung of shared memory may help.

 

I would not worry too much about how it will manage the shared memory. It should do a good job and not cripple your system. And as said that card cannot make use of 1GB so I doubt it would ever tie it up. There are even questions of whether 7950GTX can make full use of 512MB of VRAM so no way 7400 could even make use of 256MB and I doubt above 128MB.