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    Game doesn't recognize shared memory

    Discussion in 'Gaming (Software and Graphics Cards)' started by bmtabd, Apr 11, 2007.

  1. bmtabd

    bmtabd Newbie

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    Greetings,

    System: Gateway MT3705
    CPU: Core duo T2250, 1.73mhz
    Mem: 2gig RAM
    Video: Radeon Xpress 200m, 64meg dedicated, 256 shared
    HD: 100 gig

    I just purchased UbiSoft's Silent Hunter 4, a subsim game. My lappy meets all the minimum requirements except for the amount of RAM in the video card,
    (128 minimum). During testing requirements for the game it states my lappy fails because it doesn't meet the 128meg min, as it only shows the 64meg dedicated.
    Shouldn't the game recognize my shared RAM, which goes all the way to 256 megs as meeting the requirements?
    I realize that the Xpress 200m is no speed demon, but it is capable of Pixel shade 2.0 and DirectX9, so I should be able to meet the minimum requirements, including 128 meg RAM, eh? What can I do?
    Finally, the games specs state that it doesn't support the 200m at this time. If UbiSoft does come out with support for it, what is the effect of the support? Will it make the game smoother, increase FPS, etc?

    Thank you in advance.
     
  2. l33t_c0w

    l33t_c0w Notebook Deity

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    Probably not, because minimum requirements for graphics memory usually refer to dedicated memory.
     
  3. mujtaba

    mujtaba ZzzZzz Super Moderator

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    Just put in the game and play.
    Xpress 200m will use the system ram as it sees fit (up to the limit)
     
  4. Jalf

    Jalf Comrade Santa

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    When a game decides it "can't" run on your system, it is generally a completely arbitrary decision made by the game simply to try to save you the grief of a game running like crap.

    The game does not "require" any amount of gpu memory, because that's all handled by DirectX, not the game and the game doesn't even know how much memory is available, technically speaking. But most likely, somewhere during testing, the developers found out that "hey, if you don't have at leat 128MB dedicated GPU memory, the game runs like crap", and so they put in that little check.

    The point is, it's not because it doesn't recognize shared memory. (From the game's point of view, there's nothing to recognize, because hte whole shared/dedicated memory thing is handled by DirectX and the OS and the GPU driver behind the scenes.
    The "problem" is simply that the devs choose to pull the brakes if the game determines it's running on a system like yours.