More VRAM?

[FurdTurgeson]

My 1070 is on backorder for a few weeks so I have to live with this 2GB 960 for a few more weeks. I know this probably doesn't exist, but is there a command or a setting in Windows that lets you use some of the unused RAM and put it to use towards the VRAM on your graphics card? I have 16GB in my system and I hardly use any of it and would like to until my 1070 comes. It's frustrating in games where I can only go up to Medium texture settings because my VRAM is too low, while the rest of the card can handlr very high settings.

 

Thanks in advance from Tucson,

WSAD

[Skiiwee29]

No unfortunately there is no way for you to allow your system memory to be used as VRAM. System memory is actually alot slower than VRAM so it would actually cause game play issues much like the 970 when you needed to access that last .5gig of VRAM. 

[Enderman]

When a GPU runs out of vram it starts to use system RAM. Since your system ram is like 50x slower than vram you still get stuttering.

[FurdTurgeson]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

When a GPU runs out of vram it starts to use system RAM. Since your system ram is like 50x slower than vram you still get stuttering.

But some lower priced graphics cards even use DDR3 instead of GDDR5, how is it 50x slower?

[VerticalDiscussions]

Its pretty much like Virtual Memory. Snail slow extra!

[Enderman]

10 minutes ago, WSADKeysGaming said:

But some lower priced graphics cards even use DDR3 instead of GDDR5, how is it 50x slower?

By being integrated on the GPU itself and having a direct connection to the chip you get much higher speeds.

The closer the memory is to the chip the higher speeds you get.

That's why CPU cache gets hundreds or thousands of GBs per second.

[Glenwing]

13 minutes ago, WSADKeysGaming said:

But some lower priced graphics cards even use DDR3 instead of GDDR5, how is it 50x slower?

It's not the memory type, it's the ability to communicate with the memory. The memory on the GPU is connected directly through the GPU's built in memory bus. On the other hand communications with the system RAM need to be done over the PCI Express bus, which is significantly lower in the amount of data that it can handle.

 

256-bit 8 GHz memory bus = 256 GB/s

PCI Express 3.0 ×16 = 16 GB/s

 

Anyway, when you run out of dedicated RAM on the graphics card, it overflows into system RAM, so what you are asking for is how things are already.