Above 4g Decoding Nvidia 3070

[Ibanez_Steve]

Hi,

 

I have a 3070 GPU which has 8gb of memory. Should I enable above 4g decoding? What does this do and what are the benefits/disadvantages of doing so?

 

THanks,
Steve

[mariushm]

Doesn't have anything to do with video card ram quantity. 

 

Has to do with where drivers for hardware reserve a portion of computer RAM for their own use and that's where data is put before it's transferred into a device. For example the video card may reserve a portion of 256 MB of computer ram, where the video card driver "uploads" textures or stuff that needs to go into the video card, and then the driver issues a command and that region of memory is transferred through pci-e into the video card's VRAM. 

 

If you enable above 4G decoding, you allow these portions of computer ram to be reserved above the 4 GB threshold.  Has to do with some old hardware and drivers being written with 32 bit in mind where the maximum memory that can be accessed is/was 4 GB. 

 

This option seems to be required if you enable Smart Access Memory or whatever  the PCI-e Resizable BAR feature is called by Intel or nVidia  ... Smart Access Memory is AMD's name for  resizable BAR which is a part of the pci-e standard  (though AMD claims they made some tweaks and improvements and have some proprietary smarts on top of the resizeable BAR feature of pci-e)