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Video Memory on Windows Boot Camp

raquiros

raquiros

macrumors member
Original poster
I'm a gaming guy... and I'd been using Boot Camp to play games on Windows which are not compatible with Mac OS X, I'm curious on why my video memory is 128MB according to the System Information on Mac OS X, and when I'm using Windows it shows 512MB of Dedicated Video Memory.... it also runs pretty well the newer games with everything on High.... what's the deal here?? is it the mac video card too much for Windows so it gets detected that way or is something I can manually configure? My RAM memory doesn't seems to get any robbed memory when I check the System Properties on XP
 
What the 8600M GT GPU possess' is something called Turbo Cache. Windows detects the absolutely maximum amount of memory of both the Discrete Video Ram and the Shared System Ram called TurboCache for Nvidia Cards (called Hyper Memory in ATI cards). That is why you see 512mb instead of 128mb.

When all the discrete memory has been used up in a task of a video game or some graphics application, the GPU will then grab some shared memory from a 'pool' of TurboCache shared memory from your system ram, to help stabilize the performance of the application. Now this TurboCache is not as reliable as Discrete Memory but it does help out when your GPU is memory starved.

Now unlike ATI Hypermemory where it automatically grabs some RAM right upon start-up, TurboCache ONLY grabs the additional system ram when it absolutely needs to.

Hope this helps!
 
I consider that gaming is much better on XP that on Mac OS X (as a personnal opinion)

My question is... is there any way to increase the video memory on bootcamp? is it really worth? or 512MB is far enough?

Thanks in advance
 
Probably not because you already have the max amount of RAM you can hold, which is where you could help out the GFX card.
 
durant0s said:
Probably not because you already have the max amount of RAM you can hold, which is where you could help out the GFX card.
Click to expand...

My dedicated video memory is 128MB, and I'm seeing 512MB of video... that means 384MB is the maximum of shared?
 
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