general question about games and graphics cards...

say your graphics card has 128 discrete ram... how much of this is used by the os at any given moment doing low intensive tasks like searching the web, checking email etc... the more important question i would like an answer to is when you play a game, is everything dumped onto the cpu/system ram to fully take advantage of the discrete ram? i was curious as to how much this could affect performance of the gpu/discrete ram if say 15 megs of it was taken up by the os at any given moment.

 

Well, as long as your not using an 3D apps your graphics card is largely unused.

So, the OS doesn't any video RAM unless you running some 3D application or if you have Windows Vista.

When gaming the CPU/RAM/HDD are used most by whatever application requires it the most. Its really simple.

If you are running a game chances are most of your computers resources will be used by the game, while some will be used by the OS. It all depends though and how many background processes and such you are running.

 

Probably around 8MB - 16MB of video memory is used during menial tasks such as web surfing. That's just an educated guess though.