ATI Hyper-Memory Card??

[Russ]

I want to buy a hyper memory Sapphire 1GDDR3 HD6450 for my kids' computer at home just to shy away from integrated graphics solutiuon. I know how hyper memory works but I just want to ask something that confuses me about hyper memory cards. Does this present technology works dynamically? (meaning it borrows system memory only when needed by the application) or does it automatically "steal" certain amount of system memory right after the card's installation process or if you enable it in BIOS setting?? I'm against decreasing the system RAM but if it works dynamically then its OK, but if its the other way around, I think it would be better to buy a card with a dedicated memory. Please advice. Thanks!

[fenyal]

HyperMemory is ATI Technologies' method of using the motherboard's main system RAM as part of or all of the video card's framebuffer memory on their line of Radeon video cards and motherboard chipsets. It relies on new fast data transfer mechanisms within PCI Express.
However, to make up for the inevitably slower system RAM with a video card, a small high-bandwidth local framebuffer is usually added to the video card itself. This can be noted by the one or two small RAM chips on these cards, which usually have a 32-bit or 64-bit bus to the GPU. This small local memory caches the most often needed data for quicker access, somewhat remedying the inherently high-latency connection to system RAM.
The local and system memory areas are not noticeably separate to the user and often HyperMemory solutions are advertised as having as much as 1919 MB RAM when this is actually referring to the potential use of system RAM.
HyperMemory offers significant cost reduction to low-end video cards because of the reduction in trace complexity on the video card PCB, and a reduction in the amount of RAM needed on the card. The solution offers excellent performance for 2D acceleration tasks while also maintaining adequate memory speed capable of playing some modern 3D game titles with reduced quality. A video card with hyper memory typically is slower in 3d benchmarks than a similar video card which has its own discrete video memory.
Video cards implemented with HyperMemory usually bore the HM or LE suffix, for further details, see ATI Video Card Suffixes article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Video_Card_Suffixes#HM_.28HyperMemory.29


as for what information i know about hyper memory, it does exactly what integrated graphics does. hyper memory uses system memory like a cache for the card and i do believe this will be a constant effect.

personally i would shy away from any form memory sharing as that generally kills a computers performance.

the 1 exception would be windows "ready boost" feature.

the card WILL take what it needs from your system right off the top so, yea it will "steal" what ever it's designed to use. (no doubt this will be dependent on how much system ram you currently have)

my recommendation. especially after a little research would be to go with a non hyper memory version or another card in the same price/performance bracket if possible.

i hope i have helped. if you have any more questions please feel free to ask.

[mavroxur]

I agree with Fenyal. Don't go for shared memory cards. Try to get a card with dedicated memory on the card, as these will always run circles around a card that uses shared system memory.

[Guest]

[debs3759]

Sorry for the delayed response. Hyper memory, like NVidia's turbocache, allocates memory dynamically, so it will use system memory only when an application needs it. I agree with the other replies, that you are better to get a card with dedicated memory, but if you really want one that uses hyper memory, get one with as much on-board memory as possible, so there will be less need for it to allocate system memory. If you only use the computer for browsing, office work, etc, then you may not notice any performance loss. If you use it for gaming, especially modern games, you will see a big loss of performance compared to having dedicated memory.