NVIDIA Go 7900 GTX Shared Memory...

When I first bought my Dell XPS M1710, the video card was listed as "NVIDIA Go 7900 GTX 512M memory shared"

This concerned me remembering the old stigma of shared memory in a video card and the horrible performance that would ensue.

I may have posted here, I don't remember, and people assured me it wasn't shared memory, but dedicated. The DELL salesman said the same thing, that it's dedicated.

I've noticed that applications think my video card had 768M of memory. I assumed it was just a bug since my card was so new, but now in Windows Vista I found something interesting.

When I look at the properties of my video card, it says that my card has 512M of dedicated memory and 271M of shared System memory.

Could someone please explain this to me? If it is using and extra 271M of shared memory, is there any way I can shut it off? 512M is enough for any game right now, and I'm afraid in usual Windows fashion that it may be trying to use this shared memory first over dedicated, which would be slower.

Does anyone have any idea what this "shared" memory is?

thanks

 

The 7900GTX can't do shared memory. You have 512MB dedicated, and it has another bit allocated for textures. You don't want to turn that off, it's not constantly allocated.