Weird way of increasing Video Ram (ATi)

Hi everyone!

Got my notebook upgraded to 2GB today (1XASUS default, 1X Kingston) . Everything in the notebook performs better.

Went around the display options and saw something weird.



I have a 1GB X1700.

Ok...how did the X1700 get to sharing 767 MB of the main ram? When it was at 1GB it shared only 256MB (which is the specification of the card of 256MB dedicate+256 share). Is it a bug in Vista?

More info - Vista x64, Catalyst Control Center V7.31 Asus.

Edit - My friend also managed to get his x700 to 639 mb video ram (upgrade to 2GB), from the initial 128 ded+256 shard setup.
Maybe it's not a bug. It's a hack to increase Vram in a notebook?

 

ok basically the ati video ram sharing is software based.

any ati radeon card can do it- and your x1700 will take system ram as it sees fit up to 1 gig. its not a very good solution though. honestly there is not going to be an advantage to taking a 700 megs of your system ram for video. its not fast enough- its hogging the fsb- and the x1700 itself isnt fast enough to use much more than 256 megs.

so you need to go into your settings and limit the amount of ram your x1700 can commandeer. 512 megs max total for the x1700 so 256megs of actual vram, 256 megs of system ram. trust me- things will move faster. even games.

google.com can help you in your quest.

 

Very true. It is pointless to have a midrange graphics card hog up so much system RAM. For example, i've read benchmarks of both a 256mb geforce go 7600 and a 512mb version. There is virtually no performance increase.

 

exactly.

i might add though- that having 2 gigs of system ram available for the system itself is going to increase your performance a LOT. every ounce of ram you have available means one less time you have to access the hard drive. that translates to less "hitching" in games- better battery life- and way better general desktop performance.

 

No wonder. It seems like the algorithm by ATi is "Take half of the total main ram as your own shared vram". Half of 2GB is 1GB....sure is going to be tough finding a way to decrease the ram usage.

 

After a few days of googling it seems that there is no way except to disable Hypermemory completely, a scenario which i will like to avoid. Is there any other methods to lower the 1GB of memory?

 

You might want to check the Catalyst Control Center. A notebook which we sold had an X200M, and you could set the size of HyperMemory there.
If that doesn't work, take a look at the BIOS.

 

Both the BIOS and the Catalyst Control Center has no options of setting the Hypermemory.

It is affecting the game's performance as X1700 won't be able to handle 1GB total of Video Ram (post 2). It ends up Game taking 800MB, OS taking 800MB, then the rest to the Video ram; although both the OS and the game have readyboost and virtual memory to fall back on.

 

why don't u just disable the hypermemory? 256mb is plenty for a x1700

 

Did it, but the performance became slightly worse then with Hypermemory enabled.

(i was playing F.E.A.R and Half Life 2 at the mid-high settings)

Edit - Sorry i forgot to mention it was disabled when i was still running XP. My bad.

 

The x1700 with 256mb dedicated will be very unlikely use HyperMemory if it runs out of dedicated video ram. Its not fast enough.

 

I tried to look for the entries in the registry just now. The registry entries were not in both the 32bit and 64bit regedit. It supposedly will disable Hypermemory, and it worked on my 32bit XP.

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ATI Technologies\CDS\0000\0\Memory

There will be an hypermemory string modify it to No (0x00000000) instead of Yes (0x00000001)"

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33866647

 

Just wondering: is the nVIDIA control pannel more helpful/userfriendly than the ATi one? I mean, can you modify the amount of RAM allocated to Turbocache?

 

not at all.

my understanding is that nvidia's implementation of "hypermemory" - (sounds fast, doesn't it?) - is slightly better than ati's because it is built into the hardware instead of being software based. that means that it is marginally faster, still utterly useless, and its going to be harder to turn off.

i have a 256 meg 8600m gt, and in windows xp it comes up as 512 megs. so im assuming its stealing 256 megs. never asked me, never saw any settings... nothing.

edit- i have a desktop ati card, and i know i can turn on hypermemory or turbomemory or whatever if i want to. i dont.

turbo and hyper all sound fast, but it actually just slows everything down. gotta love marketing.

 

Does anyone know how to disable ATI X1700 Hypermemory in Windows Vista ?

My ASUS F3jp has been configured with 256(MB) dedicated + 763(MB) of Hypermemory. (I think Vista may have done this automatically on 1-> 2 (GB) RAM upgrade)

but a 1(GB) total display RAM seems crazy and is dragging my application response time down

Is it possible to disable Hypermemory in the Windows Vista registry settings as it was (posted in this forum) for Windows XP ?
--------------------------------------------------------
In Windows XP its apparently possible to disable it in the registry:-

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ATI Technologies\CDS\0000\0\Memory

There will be an hypermemory string modify it to No (0x00000000) instead of Yes (0x00000001)"
-----------------------------------------------------------
What about Windows Vista, Is there an equivalent ?

ASUS support said they don't know how to limit Hypermemory and didn't know of any BIOS settings to limit it !

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

 

Interesting thread

How can I tell how much my X1600 is taking? XP SP2 Home here. CC says nothing. And seeing as it is software based, how do I know it isn't being naughty and taking half of my 1.5gb ram when I am playing games?