Memory Question..

Edited: 'Video' Memory Question..

Ok this may sound n00bish, but I keep reading that anything over 1gb of memory on a video card is somewhat useless.. I am under the impression that the onboard memory is somewhat related to your screen's width and height in pixels. I thought it also stored texture data, possibly even coordinates for vertices etc..

One of the reasons I ask is because in certain games I play like Modern Warfare2 for example, as I am running through a map, I can see stuff being loaded in. I would have thought that all these little objects etc would already be 'placed' on the screen and not have to be loaded in while I am running by them.. I looked around google briefly and I tried to find an application that would show how much video memory is used at a time but I could not find anything. Perhaps I didn't google using the correct phrase.

Update: I found a program called vidmemwatch.. But all the links to download it point to a down server. Has anyone used this?

ati tray tool has an OSD option that suposedly shows GPU memory use , and system memory use in the game. havent tried showing THAT yet, but the OSD works, and like frapps slows display down some. good to see thing, then after seeing shut off to really play.

Many games are not Strictally limited to the GPU memory at the time, and will shift stuff in and out of memory to survive a lower memory situation. some will just regularly shift it in and out, not bothering with trying to use all the memory you have anyway , just to be compatable with more cards. there is probably game config tweaks you can do with some games to force stuff to stay, and therfore force the use of more memory.

Also, many games "load" fast to get you going, leaving out textures not yet seen, then they background load many Other textures in slowly, which IMO doesnt work. on those games if you just Park and wait all the things that load in "as you go by" will be allowed to load before you go by them. of course not all games work the same.

With most new games and video driver stuff working proper together, what you SEE has tons of missing things, just because you dont see them Now. You could be looking at a whole town that looks all together, and it is nothing but a Hollywood set , because optomisations dont render it untill it needs to.

the "screen" is displaying stuff that is in the memory, there is no screen without the memory (so to speak) the rest you know.
the ammount of memory used for the screen bufffers nowdays is probably minor compared to the use of it for texture maps.

The Pictures used for texture maps CAN be different for different resolution settings. I have seen 2 sets of textures being part of the same game, but the textures themselves are stretched and distorted and "rendered" to the display resolutions. So other than the game having Low-res textures and high-res textures minor variations in resolution still use those Same textures stretched to your resolution.
Also there are "mods" that sometimes have higher resolution textures.
So generally the textures are mapped to the display, and other than jumping to low resolution the memory they use will not change from minor resolution changes.

to add to all that , there are tweaks in Ati Tray Tools, and other driver manipulation utilities (like rivatuner) that will claim to allow the user to change compression ammount and bit quantity used for the textures. I dont mess with that.
.

Thank you for that explanation! I had looked around yesterday after this thread to see what I could come up with. I really didn't get this much info though. That makes total sense that the game might not be fully loaded in and this is what I am seeing.. I remember back in the Unreal days you could change cache sizes in the config file and it supposedly let more of the actual environment load into memory for play.

I just see a ton of posts on here regarding memory size and how anything over 2 gb is a waste. I guess the manufacturers aren't losing really any money by putting an extra 2 gb on a board and sellling it (various 5970 cards). Once again though thanks for the explanation!