256mb 6800GT and Vista question

[agentsmith23]

I just installed vista a few days ago and I noticed that it shows my video memory as 512MB but my video card (6800GT) has only 256MB. Why is this happening? I was originally thinking that it was sharing memory as if it were an intergrated video card but I checked how much memory was showing up and it showed 1GB so that doesn't seem to be it. As far as I can tell it doesn't seem to help video performance at all and I'm not sure if it is hurting the way vista performs.

Any ideas?

[Sederien]

If you keep your games or other apps at the same settings you used to, it shouldn't hurt performance. The only way it would is if the system tried to put 512MB of video information in your 256MB card and the excess ended up going through system ram.

Either way, seems more of a display/information error than an actual worry. Someone more familiar with Vista might be able to chime in, though.

[JamesXP]

Probably using TurboCache.