[shaheel16]

Hi. I dont know why Vista has enabled shared video memory for my graphics card. Its a GF6200 256 MB and I dnt undrstand the point of sharing.. I have 768 MB RAM and due to sharing I'm left with only about 512-640 MB... and somethimes the level of available RAM drops low....

Plz.. help me out. I've already changed my BIOS settings n desable shared graphics and so on... but no effect..

[Elvandil]

What setting do you have for texture memory (aperture size)? Do you have an onboard graphics card that is not disabled?

[shaheel16]

Texture memory is 384 MB in Vista{due to sharing}

My motherboard is ECS P4VMM2 and has onboard S3 graphics but I've disabled it in BIOS and Set to AGP. The Aperture size in BIos for AGP is set to 128...

[Elvandil]

Sounds like you've done the usual things.

Any BIOS updates available for Vista compatibility?

Does BIOS allow you to really disable the onboard, or is it possible there is an board jumper for that?

[horsecharles]

I'm gonna take a wild guess re your onboard video:

It probably only comes with some ridiculously low amount like 32 mb...and thus obligatorily needs to borrow(share...nice innocuous way of phrasing that, no? ) from the OS.

If your video bus is agp only, you can get on clearance some 256mb card for @ $35.

If you need pci-e, then $100 or so can get you one as high as 512mb & recent:8x00 series on the Nvidia side.

[Courtneyc]

Not so fast. I have 751MB of video memory due to shared memory (of 495MB). However, I don't have on-board video. I have a GeForce 7900 GT/GTO video card in a PCIe*16 slot. There is no system video memory, and no on board graphics whatsoever. By the way, the video card has 256MB of on board memory.

Luckily, it's taking it from the memory Vista can't use. (I have 4GB, but Vista can only access 3.2 due to it being the 32-bit package.)

Any other ideas.

Courtney sends....

[Elvandil]

Please list the memory usage as it appears in your Advanced Display Properties under the Adapter tab.

[oldhome7]

I have this problem too... Is there any way to disable the shared memory?

Taken from the Performance Information and Tools:
Display adapter type Radeon X1900 Series
Total available graphics memory 767 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 512 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 255 MB

Thats also pretty much what it says under the adapter tab in the advanced display properties... just couldnt copy and paste from there

[Elvandil]

That 256 is probably the "aperture size" that is set in the BIOS. You may be able to reduce it to 64 at the expense of texture performance. Enter BIOS setup.

[GazUK]

i belive its vista, i only noticed this myself after i uprgaded my graphics cards,

intialy i had 2x Geforce 6800GT's with 256mb ram each total 512mb,

i have just purchased and installed an 8800 GT with 320mb ram and i used vista's inbuild

"Windows Experience Index" which rates your system i expected a higher rating due to faster graphics card however the rating actualy went down because the memory operations were lower.

I looked into this and it was taking 780mb of my system memory, i did intialy think this to be the bios however it not because i couldn't find a way to set an apature size, i'm not even sure if you can with a PCI-E slot, for the record i'm using a MSI K8N SLi.

I can't find a way to change this but would like to since system memory is slower than graphics memory and the card should have plenty enough with 320mb

[GazUK]

any ideas on how to change this setting anyone?

[horsecharles]

Originally Posted by GazUK

any ideas on how to change this setting anyone?

Setting's hard-coded by nVidia, never heard of anyone ever been able to change it.

[raha]

I have an ATI 1600 with 512 MB video memory and the same thing happen to me here too !
I have 1GB RAM but Vista is allocating 256MB of my RAM to Shared graphic memory

What is going on ? how can we stop this shared memory. I do not also have any on board graphic card what so ever.

[Pyronical]

Vista does hog memory. Mine had 512MB ram so I put in 1024MB more and the shared video did eat some of that but video and program use is still better now..

[raha]

Ok, but how can i fix this ? and I have 1 GB memory, is this enough for Vista ? I have a good CPU and good Graphics but Vista is really slow on my machine. I am buying USB flash memory to boost the system. is there any other ways to stop Vista from sharing my RAM with my Graphic card ?