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Blessa Mar 7, 2014 @ 10:33pm

What exactly is VRAM?

I just bought a new laptop with an i5 4200u with 6gbs of RAM and i wanted to play old games I had on my steam account cause I know this thing can't handle crysis or bf4. I went on Can I Run It, and searched Sine Mora and it said I needed 256mb of Dedicated Video Ram. So I went into the Asus bios and set my VRAM to 512mbs. I tested minecraft just incase anything changed and my FPS went down by 10 frames to 30. So what exactly is VRAM? What did I change in my laptop?

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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments

Quazimortal Mar 7, 2014 @ 11:06pm

When a game says that it needs Video RAM then it is saying it needs that much RAM just on your graphics card. Virtual RAM, or VRAM, is a setting you can change to setup a portion of your hard drive to be used as RAM. Typically VRAM is slower than physical RAM and if you aren't careful your computer may prioritize VRAM over physical RAM making things run much slower.

Last edited by Quazimortal; Mar 7, 2014 @ 11:06pm

Marble Mar 7, 2014 @ 11:15pm

Originally posted by Blessa:
I just bought a new laptop with an i5 4200u with 6gbs of RAM and i wanted to play old games I had on my steam account cause I know this thing can't handle crysis or bf4. I went on Can I Run It, and searched Sine Mora and it said I needed 256mb of Dedicated Video Ram. So I went into the Asus bios and set my VRAM to 512mbs. I tested minecraft just incase anything changed and my FPS went down by 10 frames to 30. So what exactly is VRAM? What did I change in my laptop?

In your case, it's how much of your system RAM is dedicated to the GPU. In a desktop or laptop with dedicated graphics, the GPU would have it's own faster RAM instead of sharing the system RAM.

You do NOT need to mess with the VRAM settings in the BIOS, your PC will already handle this automatically.

Blessa Mar 8, 2014 @ 1:56am

Originally posted by Canti:
Originally posted by Blessa:
I just bought a new laptop with an i5 4200u with 6gbs of RAM and i wanted to play old games I had on my steam account cause I know this thing can't handle crysis or bf4. I went on Can I Run It, and searched Sine Mora and it said I needed 256mb of Dedicated Video Ram. So I went into the Asus bios and set my VRAM to 512mbs. I tested minecraft just incase anything changed and my FPS went down by 10 frames to 30. So what exactly is VRAM? What did I change in my laptop?
In your case, it's how much of your system RAM is dedicated to the GPU. In a desktop or laptop with dedicated graphics, the GPU would have it's own faster RAM instead of sharing the system RAM.

You do NOT need to mess with the VRAM settings in the BIOS, your PC will already handle this automatically.

It was originally 32mb, should I put it back to it's original setting?

Dr. Gregory House, M.D. Mar 8, 2014 @ 2:51am

Originally posted by Blessa:
Originally posted by Canti:
In your case, it's how much of your system RAM is dedicated to the GPU. In a desktop or laptop with dedicated graphics, the GPU would have it's own faster RAM instead of sharing the system RAM.

You do NOT need to mess with the VRAM settings in the BIOS, your PC will already handle this automatically.
It was originally 32mb, should I put it back to it's original setting?

Yes, otherwise you will experience stuttering and fps drops.