4G vs 8G

No question: 8GB.

You haven't seen any usage above 4GB on your 8GB system because the system doesn't keep track of how much system memory your graphics card takes up when gaming. Yes, your graphics card takes system memory while gaming, using it for texture storage.

To find out how much system memory your graphics card uses, go to the WEI page and click on the "View and print detailed performance and system information" link on the right side.

Here's mine:
Total available graphics memory: 4095MB
Dedicated graphics memory: 1280MB (from my GTX 570)
Dedicated system memory: 0
Shared system memory: 2815MB

The "Shared system memory" is the important number. If I only had 4GB of system RAM, it wouldn't be able to have anywhere near as much shared system memory for the graphics card to use. That would mean more graphical anomalies like missing textures, plus poorer game performance overall.

Read this also: Memory-Hungry Graphics Cards?
The parts in German are the detailed performance and system information I showed you how to look at just above in this post.

I thought the reason GPU's had their own RAM in the first place was so that they don't hog the system's resources.

How do I get to the WEI page? Or is it how do I view all of that.

Nevermind I found it.



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Since the GPU is borrowing from the system RAM does that mean the GPU can support Eyefinity better?

What do you think?

I have no idea if Eyefinity is memory-limited, so I don't know whether it would have any effect at all.

Doesn't it help to have more RAM at higher resoultions?

The system RAM that is shared cannot be used actively like the memory that is on the graphics card itself. It can only be used to store textures and other background operations.

More RAM on the graphics card would probably help (like a 2GB card versus a 1GB card), but I don't think the shared system RAM will. I might be wrong though.