I've got a GTX 760 with 2gb of vram, yet my system has 2gb of system ram dedicated to the card. My question is- how can i unallocate this memory? I am constantly crashing with crash reports detailing a directx failure and ram issues, and want to know how to use only my GPU's memory. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/378612-33-prevent-dedicated-graphics-card-sharing-system-memory
This thread dives a little deeper into things, but essentially says that Windows has this for extreme situations. To further prove his point here's a couple images of my task manager, and the screen that shows dedicated memory.
http://i42.tinypic.com/2envyo3.png
http://i43.tinypic.com/25arl3q.png
By comparing the two you can see that the graphics card is not using 3gb of memory, but instead the system is.
What's important to clarify right now, is how much RAM are you currently running inside your PC, and what type of Windows are you running x86 or x64 (64bit or 32bit)? If you have sufficient memory over 4gb and are only running a 32bit OS, you will run into memory issues, since 32bit cannot utilize more than 4gb of RAM. If you have less than 4gb of RAM, then you need to put more RAM in your system, in todays world I cannot recommend having less than 6gb.
Processor: Intel i7-3770k Overclocked @ 4.2 GHz w/ Xigmatek Dark Knight II Night Hawk Ed. Cooler
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-G45
RAM: G.Skill 16gb (2x8gb) DDR3, 1600MHz
Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 760 2GB SC w/ ACX
see profile for more details.
I can't imagine why you would be having memory issues. When you look at your task manager does it show that you have 16gb available?
I have a marginally similar setup (core components) and have manually dedicated 1Gb of system RAM to the Intel GPU, but the OS still dedicates an additional 768Mb of system RAM. Like the others have said, with 16Gb of RAM I don't notice a thing. Have you made sure that the Intel GPU isn't using shared RAM in the Bios? I think I had to Tell it do use memory, but forget now. Either way there's no reason it should be causing memory issues/crashes.
That said, have you tried running a widget to check on memory usage while you're doing stuff? Maybe there's a pattern to what's causing your memory leaks. Perhaps you have a 32bit app that doesn't like the extra memory? Have you tried this without the CPU OC? Weirder things have happened in trouble shooting so I'd almost start with that just in case. I forget how to do it, but I think there's a way to start a log of your system resources too. That'd give you a way to see what's happening when.