Vista shared video memory
 

I've been wondering something for a while, 32 bit Vista only handles 3.4 ish gigs of memory, BUT it also can dedicate system memory for shared video memory. The question is, can Vista use the unusable 600 megs of ram as shared memory for the video adapter or can it only allocate it from the 3.4 that it can use as a 32 bit system? While using Vista on my desktop i noticed it was dedicating ram to my video card,( i dont remember how much) but i still saw 3.4 gigs of ram in my task manager. If it can, then 4 gigs of memory might still be worth having even if your running 32 bit, especially if your vid card doesnt have much memory like what you see with mobile graphics cards

niether my desktop, nor my laptop have the option to share memory, but with Vista, my adaptor properties page shows that i've got shared memory as well as dedicated

Nope, unusable memory is completely unusable. 32-bit systems have only a limited number of memory addresses, and use the upper range of 4GB for hardware addressing, there's no workaround for this for non-server versions of Windows.

I stand to be corrected, but my understanding of the 32 bit OS memory limitation is that any video card memory is included in the mix.

It's a memory address issue, so vid memory uses up its share of addresses as well.

edit: Heh... Mars beat me to it. :)

how come it doesnt show as a loss in my task manager? does Vista use this shared memory dynamicaly only as its needed?

Bingo. We'd be having a real lack of memory otherwise:

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/6...amemorysc4.png

ah very good. Thanks for clarifying that for me guys.