ATI HyperMemory UMA Framebuffer on Radeon Xpress 1150 with Catalyst 8.31 XP - what's up?

So I've kind of been out of messing with video settings for a while. Finally after Christmas I decided to blow $59.99 on 2x1GB RAM from Crucial; I'd been running on 2x512 for quite a while. When I upgraded to 1 GB way back I upped the amount of RAM my video card would use for memory via the Catalyst Control Center to 128 MB.

It seems since then I've upgraded Catalyst and this option is now gone. I'm running the 8.31 version from Dell for my 1501. It does seem like it may still be using 128 MB (it seems to be set in the video BIOS or something - it used that under Linux, too), since winver reports 1,964,008 KB of physical memory available to Windows.

So... I kind of want to get updated on this situation and I'm guessing some of you would know about this. Could you fill me in? Thanks in advance.

 

It will just take what it needs.

 

Since you have Windows XP installed, you could try the latest ATI 9.11 XP for Legacy cards, use ATI mobility modder and try installing that.
But other than that i believed bios had the settings for how much ram you want to share with the igp.

 

I believe you but do you have some more info on this I can read?

OK. I haven't updated my system BIOS for ages and I don't ever remember having such a setting but I'll check again.

 

You can look up what HyperMemory does on ATI's website, but basically the GPU will dynamically allocate system RAM as if it were VRAM. Like Nvidia's Turbocache, its supposed to boost performance but in reality is simply a tool to impress customers. The system RAM doesn't have enough bandwidth to effectively push the huge amounts of data that GPUs typically move, so performance doesn't improve much with either of these technologies.

 

Right. I did know about that but I was just wondering about the dynamic amount change. It did used to be a static amount of RAM that it used.

 

Depending on the card, some will have discrete memory as well as shared memory.