Can I have insane textures with a GT 440, and 6GB of GDDR2 RAM?

trogdor8freebird

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Sep 27, 2012
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I don't know all about the details with video cards and such, but in total it says I have 4GB of Video RAM because of my GDDR2 RAM. Whenever I try to turn up/down textures in the games I've tried, the Fps never significantly drops/rises.
Is it because of my VRAM total? I do know that higher textures means it uses more VRAM, but I'm not sure what else to consider.
Lately I've been playing BF3, and I want to see if I should set it to ultra textures, or leave it on something lower. I can't really tell if having lower textures makes any noticeable difference though either, because when you change the textures in that game, it only changes when you restart/switch levels.

Also, does GDDR2 system RAM do what I think it does? Does it share VRAM with the video card when under stress from a video game, or something similar?

Edit: I forgot to mention, my video card is a Galaxy GeForce GT 440 1GB with a small overclock. Mainly mentioned this to get a bit more details out there.
 

trogdor8freebird

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First off, I think my post caused confusion. I meant to say that I have 6GB of GDDR2 system RAM (Not from my GT 440), and so when I have that system RAM in my computer - it says I have 4GB of graphics RAM instead of the standard 1GB from my video card. There is such a thing as GDDR system RAM. Also, I've looked at many benchmarks and such for BF3, and have actually played it myself - I can play it at playable settings, and when it's not as playable - it's my CPU that's the bottleneck, I already know this. As far as I know though, CPU doesn't take much of a load at all from ultra textures, it mainly effects the Video RAM. I may be wrong on that, however. That's why I created this thread. Do games use all Video RAM contributed from my GDDR2 system RAM, and if so - wouldn't I be able to use ultra textures with no Frame rate loss? I'm not asking about other settings, only the texture quality.

Here are my other specs though:

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
CPU: Intel Pentium E5300 @ 2.60 GHz
RAM: 8GB (2GB DDR2 RAM, 6GB GDDR2 RAM)

Monitor: 60Hz 1920x1080p HDTV, I play at 1280x720 resolution for BF3 so it'll be playable. I also make many other tweaks in the OS, and use boosting software.
 

Fishwithadeagle

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I believe that you are able to share the textures onto the system ram if you have to, but it will have terrible performance. Also, the gt 440 is a weak card, and nvidia uses the system ram to make people think it is a better card.
 

clutchc

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I'm thinking you still might have your on-board video enabled in bios and windows is seeing that it is cannibalizing some of the system RAM, not the discrete card.
But back to your textures question... the depth of textures you can make use of is directly proportional to the amount of vram your card has, the resolution you game at, and the capability of the card's gpu. Obviously, at 720p you will be able to use much greater textures than at a higher resolution, yes.