Allowing The Graphics Card To Use RAM

[masakabassist]

Hey all,
I recently bought a XFX 8800GTS 320mb. At the time I was using a 17" monitor with a resolution of 1280x1024. I have just bought a new 20" monitor (HP 2007v) and it seems like this card is suffering a little during games like Crysis, STALKER and even Oblivion!!! I'm tempted to say this is due to a lack of memory on the card. If the latter holds true is there a way to allow the card to use more of my RAM (as in the sticks that slot into the motherboard, not the RAM on the graphics card)? If there is a way of doing this, would it result in increased performance?

Specs are in my sig.

Thanks :)

[One Bull]

There used to be options in the bios for that, should be at pci refresh rate settings (or whatever it was, I've been out for a while) I don't know if your mobo has such a feature.

Usually the option allows you to set the amount of ram used by you gpu. There is a sweet spot (too little and your gpu will suffer, too much an your cpu will suffer) but it's kinda indiviual for each setup so you should just run 3d mark on each setting and see which setting scores highest.

[masakabassist]

I was always under the impression it was the AGP aperture size. But I'm completely unsure.

[thideras]

I was always under the impression it was the AGP aperture size. But I'm completely unsure.I think you are correct.

The card will use as much RAM as it needs, hence the slowdown. If it ran out of memory and was not allowed to use system memory, it would just crash.

[masakabassist]

I think you are correct.

The card will use as much RAM as it needs, hence the slowdown. If it ran out of memory and was not allowed to use system memory, it would just crash.

I understand. Looks like im going to have to invest in more RAM. I think I've hit my max overclock and can't afford to upgrade the CPU as well and im sure that is bottle necking the data.

Thanks guys :)