changing amount of system ram to be shared with gphx card

i'm using vista sp1 hp 64bit (but that you might already know due to what i've been asking last 2 months ) and having jfl92 rig... that means gf8600mgt w/512mb of ram... my 4gb of ram is correctly recognized by the os and reported under my computer, however it starts to anger me as the card takes, besides its own 512mb of ram, somewhere near 1800mb of system ram... the ram that could have been used elsewhere and let's face it - what's the point of having 2300mb of ram for the vid card? especially one that i have there's none... so my question is - where can i set how much system ram can be shared by the card? after i start some of my work related apps i end up with somewhere near sub 100MB of ram free... that's really not good... i tried a few drivers for the card and now i'm on ones that MS update utility found... i was hoping it'll have a switch of some kind but no... can you help me? i hope so

 

That 1800MB of ram "taken" by the gfx card is only the max amount it will use; your OS will still have 1st priority to all of your RAM, including that 1800MB that the gfx card has supposedly reserved for itself. You don't have anything to worry about.

 

is that true? wouldn't that have any negative effects on managing the ram? after all - reserving, giving away, reserving... it all takes time, doesn't it?

 

sure it does - questions are
. what is ur "time" concern? nano, mili ...?
. how would u measure the impact of "vista managing memory"?

cheers ...

 

I don't think it has any negative effects; I've got a 8400M GS that does the same thing-it reserves like 1500MB of my 4GB, but I've never seen any performance hits at all when I have a bunch of programs open. Also, the extra system RAM that the gfx card *may* use during gaming or graphics intensive stuff, it does not really help all that much with performance. The DDR3 on the graphics card is much much better

 

Well it depends on the speed of the RAM iguess. if you have 533MHz or above i wouldnt worry about it. In the rare occasion in might take the 1800MB, which it probably wont, as said, the OS has 1st priority. Especially with 4GB if memory, i wouldnt worry about it. But if you still are interested, a program like GPUz or RivaTuner, etc may have that ability to change the amount of VRAM, but im not sure.

 

well every piece of not needed operations is a bad thing i think and i know that this extra shared memory doesn't do much good... that's why i'd prefer the os to take some more ram for itslef rather than "waste" it for the card it's good to hear however that it is not really wasted

but if you say i've nothing to worry about i'm happy to hear this