Hi, I'm after running the evaluation tool on my system and my graphics card, an ATI mobility radeon x1400 256mb was evaluated as 128mb. I've installed the latest drivers and everything and in catalyst control centre it states my memory is 256mb. Is there anything i can do to sort this out? The evaluation tool that comes with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. returns the same result and it's driving me nuts.
Last edited by mildly-bemused; 09-19-2007 at 12:30 PM.
The Catalyst Center is reporting the maximum available RAM, via HyperMemory (which uses some of the system RAM) - the figure given by the STALKER tool and the GoM is the amount of RAM physically "attached" to the Radeon chip. So the total figure of 256MB is half video RAM and half system RAM.
Ok... so basically ATI screwed me out me out of 128mb actual vram, while my mate with an x1300 gets amazing draw distances in Oblivion. Thanks for the help, very much appreciated. Brilliantly useful software by the way, i've committed mysefl to world of conflict already on the strength of what i was told here. Keep up the good work.
Well, yes and no - your Mobility Radeon X1400 does have a total of 256MB available for use in graphics rendering. It's just that half of it consists of memory chips directly attached to the GPU by an 8GB/s memory interface, and the other half is part of the total system memory which is accessed by a 16x PCI Express interface. Depending your laptop's specification, the system memory's interface might be just as good as the video memory, but accessing it will always be slower than getting "directly" to video RAM.Originally Posted by mildly-bemused
All laptop chips do this and the PCI Express specification allows desktop graphics to do this too - of course, the latter usually have sufficient "onboard" video RAM for the system memory to not be used too often. The downside being when it does get used, there's a noticeably performance drop because the video RAM will be so much quicker than the system RAM.
I'm glad you like the Game-o-Meter tool - despite its simple appearance, there's an awful lot going on in "background" on our side of things, and we have continuous plans to improve and extend its features. Our World in Conflict review will be coming soon to; in it we'll show what the game will be like and describe how it plays on different levels of PCs.
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