ATI cards

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony Pacc
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Tony Pacc

Are there any ATI cards that dont share system memory,it seems like all the
ones I look at have what they call (hyper ) something or other.
 
Are there any ATI cards that dont share system memory,it seems like all the
ones I look at have what they call (hyper ) something or other.
Click to expand...

Most ATI AGP or PCI express cards do NOT share system memory. The
exception of course would be laptop video setups, but thats a factor
of the laptop constraints as anything else.

James
 
Tony Pacc said:
Are there any ATI cards that dont share system memory,it seems like all
the ones I look at have what they call (hyper ) something or other.
Click to expand...

You must be looking at the bottom feeder cards. You'll find the same thing
with Nvidia too. Most ATI cards have discrete memory. The RV370 GPU and the
X300 family are the ones where this is found for the most part.

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/hypermemory-turbocache/index.x?pg=1
 
"Hyper" is a nice marketing term to get people to buy the cheaper graphics
cards.
I would say every video card made today has the ability to use shared system
memory.
The more memory you have on your graphics card the less chance you would use
system memory.
You can minimize the chance of using system memory by going into the
motherboard BIOS
and setting "shared system memory" to 32MBs (but not smaller).
 
Don't confuse the ability of an ATI video chip to implement shared
memory with the matter of whether or not an actual implementation on an
AGP or PCI Express card actually does so. Almost all of the chips have
the ability to do so (when used directly on the motherboard). Most of
the discreet AGP and PCI Express cards, however, have onboard dedicated
memory and do not actually use shared memory.
 
In gforce world there are TurboCache cards which have only 32 onboard
memory and use system memory
Marx
 
Take a look at http://ati.amd.com/technology/hypermemory.html
Click to expand...

What you are ignoring is what is stocked and what sells. Just because
one x1600 has hypermemory, does not mean that all of them do. Go down
to Best Buy or take a look at Newegg or tigerdirect, and compare the
number of cards with hypermemory to the ones without. I've bought 3
ATI cards in the past 4 years and none of them had hypermemory. It
was most common in the low end - X300s. I had an x700SE and it did NOT
have hypermemory(though it is on that list). I have an x1600 XT and it
does NOT have hypermemory.

James
 
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