Difference between Shared/Dedicated VGA Memory

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strategist333

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Several questions about video cards:
1. What is the difference between shared and dedicated video memory and how do they work?

2. Just for office applications and database stuff (little or no games), how much memory will be enough? My current card has 2.3 MB and it plays video files at around 0.2 fps.

3. What is the difference between AGP/PCI/PCI-E; and nVidia and ATI?

Thanks
 
1. Someone else will have 2 answer

2. 64-128MB should be fine

3. AGP is Accelerated Graphics Port. build for gaming vid cards, however, it is being phased out as PCI Express has hit the market and is much better. PCI slots are for sound cards, modems, etc, etc, and uber low end vid cards. Nvidia and ATI are companies that are best known for their GPUs. Nvidia makes the GeForce line, ATI makes the Radeon line
 
Shared memory shares off the system RAM and sucks.
Dedicated is on the graphics board and is much better.
 
Does shared memory means that the video card ADDS its amount of memory to the RAM pool or does it just USES system RAM without adding any memory?
 
shared video technically means that the their is no physical card. it uses system ram to render graphics. when you buy a video card and install it, it comes with built in memory. onboard video sucks. so get a video card
 
alanuofm said:
shared video technically means that the their is no physical card. it uses system ram to render graphics. when you buy a video card and install it, it comes with built in memory. onboard video sucks. so get a video card

What do you mean that there is no physical card? What's so bad about using system RAM to render graphics; wouldn't that mean that the limit of memory would be the system RAM limit and not the video card itself?

And also, are all onboard video shared or are there some that are dedicated?
 
Onboard graphics is perfectly find if you only want to do things such as play 2d games/surf the web/watch DVDs. Also, alot of 3d games don't have hefty requirements. Yes, there are graphic intensive games such as farcry and doom3, but there are also non graphic intensive games such as wow and guild wars.
 
There are onboard Video Cards that have dedicated ram.... but they are still extremely poor performers, and they are extremely rare.

System RAM is actuall slower then video card memory. This is why video cards that steal memory (onboard shared video cards) are slower.
 
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