I have a stupid friend who says if you use a 4 gb gpu on win 32bit you will only have 3.5 gb, is that even possible?
Edit: Just to be clear I'm talking about VIDEO memory
I have a stupid friend who says if you use a 4 gb gpu on win 32bit you will only have 3.5 gb, is that even possible?
Edit: Just to be clear I'm talking about VIDEO memory
If I'm not mistaken a 32bit os will only take 4gb of all combined memory, so it isn't a set number that will be used by the gpu, just depends on the situation.
Edit: perhaps I should rephrase, its late sorry. But you have 4gb to work with, so a 4gb card is pretty much useless. If anything you'd be getting less that 3.5gb of usable video memory.
Edit: Sigh, this is a sloppy response. I'm getting dedicated and onboard memory mixed up I believe. This is something I'd actually like to test.
What is this? 2006? 2007? If you're still using a 32-bit OS for any reason, this is the least of your concerns.
If you have a system with 1 or 2GB of RAM than 32-bit still comes standard.
It's been ages since I've seen one of these conversations.
As I understood it (which could well be wrong) 32bit windows will only be able to address a portion of the memory on a video card with lots of ram. Your friend is probably not right, but probably not completely wrong either.
I seem to remember when I was running a Dell XPS with 32bit Vista I had a 512Mb video card and 3GB Ram. No problems. Then I swapped out the RAM so that I had 6GB. Only 3.2GB of system memory was reported and my wifi card stopped working. I believe this was because there was no longer an availble address space for it and this prompted my upgrade to 64bit.
There is nothing wrong with still running a 32bit OS if it still meets your requirements, native 32bit apps will run fine (and use less memory) but if you want to be able to use lot's of system and video ram then you should really upgrade.
If you are using a 32bit OS there are a few games out there that are coded in 32bit but will not work without PAE being set to allow them to address more than 2GB RAM. DCS World was one of them.
If you have a system with 1-2 GB of RAM then we're probably not talking about a desktop and we're definitely not talking about a GPU with 4 GB of VRAM.
EDIT: It's funny. I was so close to putting 'desktop OS' in the post you replied to, but figured that would be obvious.
EDIT again: I figured I'd take a look at horrible desktops on Best Buy's website (horrible, I know), and am surprised to find that out of the nine they sell with 2 GB (not counting Marketplace sellers), six have Windows 64-bit, two are Chrome OS (one of which is a Chromebook that shouldn't be listed there anyway, and one runs Linux.
Going one step further (because I hate being wrong), I looked at Walmart (seriously, horrible, I know). They sell lots of off-lease refurb machines with 2 GB of RAM. Dells, HPs, those sorts. Guess what CPUs they have? Lots of C2D, which are mostly 2006-2007 parts. So, my statement still stands. You're generally NOT going to find a current desktop with a 32-bit OS unless you try really hard.
I will however concede that most Windows tablets with 1-2 GB of RAM will have a 32-bit OS.
My question is why are you using 32-bit windows on a desktop? Isn't that the peasant version for weak laptops and tablets?
What everyone has failed to address here is that the GPU has a seperate memory interface that will take advantage of the 4gb on the graphics card. The system memory is seperate of this. Do understand that the limit applies only to system memory and not graphics since those are seperate systems. SO regardless of the OS 32 bit and 64 bit systems can take advantage of all the memory on a graphics card. however what FPS limiting and other limitations come from is the power of the system in general such as how good the CPU is and stuff
You are not quite correct, a video card needs to be able to be addressed and on a 32bit system will map to a memory address below the 4GiB limit. With a 4GB card this could well equate to 512MB reservation.
Here is a link to probably the best explanation out there;
Note, I am talking about windows here, as the link e,plains Microsoft deliberately chose to force address allocation under 4gb as many device drivers would fail to work with an address above 4GB.
No what i mean is GPU VRAM.. its the bit address of the video card that handles most memory query inside the graphics card. However when it must address system DRAM then the limit comes into play... Its kinda a strange implementation in the driver. and even on older cards Physical Address Extension can be enabled :D
Gotcha, yes I agree it's the system ram that takes the hit and not the video ram. I should have read the OP's question more clearly he does state video not system memory - doh!
Who cares? 3d applications that would require so much vram are probably all x64 and need 4+Gb of RAM to run in the first place.
all good happens to the best of us
I think the GPU's VRAM doesn't get affected by the what OS architecture. System RAM is, but not VRAM.
As far as I know, it does.