Noob here, is VRAM and graphics card the same in some way?

[A]

i have an nvidia geforce 820m and a site called game debate states that the 820m is 1gb but whenever i check my vram it's 1.7gb at most so what gives? is it an error on the site or is it something called multi-gpu? i don't know im not a big of a techie myself so sorry for being dumb.

i have an asus x550 i5 4200u 1.6ghz

[Barry_McCockinner]

your card is probably a 1Gb its adding on system Memory to make it up to 1.7GB so your dedicated Graphics Memory is 1GB

[A]

Originally posted by Bombaclad:

your card is probably a 1Gb its adding on system Memory to make it up to 1.7GB so your dedicated Graphics Memory is 1GB

so if a game needs 1gb would my system overkill it since it's 1.7gb?

[_I_]

no

if the game needs more vram it will steal system ram, which is slower than the ram on the gpu

[rotNdude]

Windows will allocate some system RAM to your video card in addition to what the video card has for dedicated RAM. The OS won't actually use it unless it's needed.

[A]

Originally posted by rotNdude:

Windows will allocate some system RAM to your video card in addition to what the video card has for dedicated RAM. The OS won't actually use it unless it's needed.

by ram you mean Memory ram? then chugging an extra 4gb ram on a 4gb ram to make it 8gb ram would be good since some ram would be allocated in the video department?

[Mittens]

Originally posted by Vault Boy シ:

Originally posted by rotNdude:

Windows will allocate some system RAM to your video card in addition to what the video card has for dedicated RAM. The OS won't actually use it unless it's needed.

by ram you mean Memory ram? then chugging an extra 4gb ram on a 4gb ram to make it 8gb ram would be good since some ram would be allocated in the video department?

VRAM is dedicated to only graphics (surfaces, textures, models, shader fx etc.), and Windows shows you 1.7GB because it can allocate (slower) RAM in your normal RAM area (for CPU) if a program exceeds the 1 GB VRAM limit you've got. That doesn't mean it's a good thing: things will slow down, because a graphics card can only access it's own VRAM and therefore Windows must swap assets between RAM and VRAM on a needed basis. If everything can be held in VRAM, it's immediately accessable by the GPU.
Think of the excess RAM as an emergency expansion, but something to avoid at all costs :)

My Skyrim w/ HD textures used to slow down to a crawl after some playing, because I ran it on a GTX 560ti 1 GB and Skyrim exceeded that 1 GB by a small margin - which forced Windows into swapping between memory areas (Skyrim needed frequent access to more of it's assets than could fit into 1 GB).

[A]

Originally posted by drunknmunkey:

Originally posted by Vault Boy シ:

by ram you mean Memory ram? then chugging an extra 4gb ram on a 4gb ram to make it 8gb ram would be good since some ram would be allocated in the video department?

VRAM is dedicated to only graphics (surfaces, textures, models, shader fx etc.), and Windows shows you 1.7GB because it can allocate (slower) RAM in your normal RAM area (for CPU) if a program exceeds the 1 GB VRAM limit you've got. That doesn't mean it's a good thing: things will slow down, because a graphics card can only access it's own VRAM and therefore Windows must swap assets between RAM and VRAM on a needed basis. If everything can be held in VRAM, it's immediately accessable by the GPU.
Think of the excess RAM as an emergency expansion, but something to avoid at all costs :)

My Skyrim w/ HD textures used to slow down to a crawl after some playing, because I ran it on a GTX 560ti 1 GB and Skyrim exceeded that 1 GB by a small margin - which forced Windows into swapping between memory areas (Skyrim needed frequent access to more of it's assets than could fit into 1 GB).

so as far as how i understand what you were saying it's like vram is leeching from ram? but what if there was an abundant ram? like 6 gb ram or something