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Convert Unneeded VRAM Into A Storage Device
Pawel Kot writes "Have you ever thought why does your graphics card has so much memory? Do You think you have not enough RAM or awfully slow swap file? Do you need fast ram-disk or diskless machine? Go for it! Take one of these cheap 128MB graphics cards and enjoy the speed. Michal Schulz wrote a good description on how to take the advantage of not used video card memory."
Isn't this a bit wasteful? I mean you can buy 128mb of memory for a LOT cheaper than one of those "ultra cheap 128mb graphics cards".
I'll stick with buying RAM and using my graphics card for what it was designed for. Besides...this only applies to X users anyway.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
If you're THAT low on memory, you're not likely to have a 128 meg video card.
Or a 64 meg card, even.
-l
Cool! Finally I have somewhere to store my Quake 3 savegames - on the spare memory of my laptop's 16meg graphics card!
Or maybe not...
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I think on a megabyte to megabyte basis, RAM is far cheaper than VRAM. This has a high coolness factor, but a very low usefulness factor. Unless all your memory slots are broken (like the ones in my old mothrboard)
Help I'm a rock.
If you HAVE a new 128 mb video card (which isn't that cheap!), you probably also have a fast processor and motherboard, and lots of memory anyway.
I strongly doubt you would buy a fast processor with an agp motherboard (needed for the card), and desperately needed memory so badly, that you take from the 128 mb video card.
is it just me, but as i was trying to decipher the english in the post, i could just hear him saying, "Hi, have you ever thought why does your graphic card has so much memory?"
i usually could care, but this post reads like ghetto yoda.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
...How to use that "cheap" P4 as a, err, inexpensive coffee warmer.
Have you ever thought why is your grammar so bad? Do you think you have not enough school or awfully slow mind? Do Slashdot need better editing?
Have you ever thought why does your graphics card has so much memory?
No, I haven't. That's probably because I think in proper English. "Why does your graphics card has so much..."
How 'bout this? "Have you ever thought, 'why does my graphics card have so much memory?'"
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
From the article, (slightly modified). My karma is capped anyway, so...
/dev/mtdblock0 /dev/mtdblock0
:)
What the hell can I do with that?
Well, many things. When I was thinking about it, I have found two ways to use it. One of them is making any filesystem on that and mounting it somewhere, the other is more sophisticated:
meehow:~# mkswap
meehow:~# swapon
Later on, more possibilities occur. You can use this methon in X11 terminals, to limit network bandwitch for example. During bootup such terminal would load kernel and compressed filesystem. The FS may be placed then on such mtdblock device and kernel may boot from it. Using console-only server with some kind of modern 32MB gfx card may use the vram as huge swap (which is way faster than swap on disk). New ideas are welcome
So what if it's cheaper to buy ram, or that it's not effecient or what not. Half the hacks posted on Slashdot tend to be next to useless anyways.
It's a cool hack, simple as that.
The AGP interface is much faster than the memory interface on most recent intel based machines. I do computer vision where a bunch of scratch pad memory is required - the memory on the graphics card is fast and can interlace with acces to main memory. Rumour has it many games take advantage of this. In Linux you can do it with X stuff and in Windows you can use DirectX to do it.
Ramdisks.. Takes me back to the days of my Amiga. I always thought the ramdisk on that was a great boost.. Made a lot of things a hell of a lot easier.
Well, that's probably what makes it a cool hack ;-)
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
I don't know why I am so cynical tonight, but give me a break - yes its cute and clever to use your video ram for something other than video but if you have a video card with a lot of ram you probably also put a reasonable amount in your computer in the first place - nice stunt, but not very useful IMHO.
Not really. There have been hacks that allow you to setup a RAMdisk in video memory for years (since back in the days of 256KB video cards). This is old 5k001.
Would the speed of the VRAM be affected by the AGP read back bandwidth issue? I'm looking for the story that was posted on slashdot a while back, but the search function is less than adequate.
On another note, this would be usefull for older machines that only have SIMMS and use EDO/FP RAM which is a lot more expensive than todays SD/DDR RAM. But, alas, those old machine don't have AGP ports. So, really, I don't see the point to this.
Cthulhu Saves.
RAM right now varies from PC-133 (133Mhz) up do DDR400 (200Mhz DDR effectively 400Mhz)
where as VRAM on most cards with 128meg of VRAM range from 600Mhz-700Mhz. So would there be a bottleneck accessing this VRAM from the AGP bus as opposed to RAM from the FSB? (I believe the AGP runs at 66Mhz still?)
Check it out, it works http://www.
From first hand experience in the field, graphics hardware guys do not sweat reliability of the data inside their DRAMs. If you're storing important data there, be prepared for it to disappear, particularly if you are a l33t overclocker.
I guess, since you can't use your texture RAM in Linux anyway (unless you want to watch 3d screen savers), you might as well put all the RAM on that GeForce 4 to use somehow.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Wow, does this take me back! I remember the really good old-school DOS memory managers (QEMM, for example) were able to create a handful more conventional memory beyond the 640k limit by using video memory in textmode. Quite handy for things like Word Perfect 5.1.
<JOKE>
So I guess Linux is finally catching up to DOS.
</JOKE>
There was some work done toward getting Linux to map VRAM in as regular-old user or kernel memory. I don't have the link handy, but I believe I saw it on the linux-kernel list.
Occasionally I have delusions of trying something like this - treating the division between the VRAM and regular RAM as a case of non-uniform memory access, and using existing algorithms to prefer the faster memory.
Here's some instances...
/tmp on headless servers? (Its common to leave a video card in headless servers for maintanance).
I just happen to have a nVidia geForce2go which I'm using in vesa mode becasue the nvidia module is proprietary...
Now I can swap to the video memory I'm not using and put that memory to use.
How about using that video memory for
I just don't understand why people are so negative when people have come up with a new way to show just how flexible the linux kernel can be... just because some feature doesn't meet your needs doesn't mean it doesn't meet mine.
If you want a one size fit all solution, then try some of those companies in the northwest part of the country.
If you've used up all the slots you have available for RAM, this is one way to pack more RAM into your machine.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to we
This goes to show how virus authors's creativity evolves pretty fast, its funny how nowadays someone is showing how to use VRAM for legitimate purposes. Who would have known? Those crazy VXers thought of it first.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
I was a (potential) moderator in this discussion, but posting this will lose me that right.
I keep seeing the offer of crack for moderators.
Where do I go to get mine?
Don't you know how perty X is with 64MB of DDR on a GeForce3? Try running top and you'll see that X barely even shows up on the charts with that much ram on a video card. I rarely see more than 5% memory usage by X.
The guy who was working on the Doom port was trying to get extra memory from anywhere that he could so that he could load the WAD files entirely into memory.
He had this wonderful idea of allocating the frame buffer and then using the excess video memory to store extra data.
It failed miserably when he realised that you can't actually read from the Dreamcast's VRAM, only write.
have a motherboard with an embedded graphics controller and this lets me make use of the otherwise dead card (I don't want to buy another monitor)
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
Ultimately it is irrelevant whether a practical application exists for this specific hack. It represents a gain in knowledge and a better familiarity with the machines we employ.
Say you want the hide "data", outside of normal memory. This a great way to add secure memory.
Write a fast bitblit routine to erase the "hidden memory. Use the graphic engine to add real time xor of crypto keys.
Don't think of it as just memory but think of it as secret memory.
Shaun
now i can use the 2megs that X _DIDN'T_ gobble up!
Most of the drivers and TSRs that I wanted to load in the space originally allocated for monochrome video (a 32K block between B0000 and B7FFF) required more space to load than to run so I came up with the solution of 'borrowing' some VRAM and wrote the Video Hole package to do just that. I used a BIOS call to change the display page from 0 to 6 (for reasons I never quite understood, 7 didn't work on my old Trident 8900) and 'borrowed' 24000 bytes (6 pages of VRAM) from the VRAM to allow a program (say MSCDEX?) to fit in there, then 'recalled' the loan, changing back to page 0. That extra 24K more than took care of the transient portion of a lot of programs that otherwise couldn't use the Video Hole.
I don't know if anyone else ever used the darned thing (nobody ever sent me the $5 shareware fee for doing so) but it got uploaded to a bunch of BBSes and works in the real mode phase of Win95 and 98 - if you have hardware with real mode drivers that don't know how to load low and relocate the resident portion high, it will do the job fine.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Although I don't have a lot of VRAM to spare, this gave me an idea I might play with...
I have an old 486DX4 system, with one of those cool AMD 486 processors with double L1 cache and Write-Back (WB) cache mode. (Trust me, these 486's are much faster than the rest of the pack). There's only one problem though: the motherboard has very few L2 cache (256k), which makes it unable to cache more than 32MB of RAM in WB mode. So, to put in more memory, I would either have to switch to Write-Through (WT), which would be slow, or have a mix of cacheable and non-cacheable memory, which is even slower.
What does all this have to do with the mentioned article, you might wonder? Well, it immediately gave me the idea that I might be able to add more RAM to that PC, use the lowest (cacheable) part for the system, and use the above as a Memory Technology Device (MTD), perhaps putting some swap space on it. Weird, huh? Still, if it works, it'll probably be somewhat better than leaving the extra memory in a drawer gathering dust...
Too bad I'll be travelling in a few days, so my spare time right now is next to zero. *sigh* But I'll have to try it sometime.
Vasilis Vasaitis
Late readers: please moderate at Newest First, with a low threshold, to promote late writers.
I just don't understand why people are so negative...
Sort of like when the guy cut and pasted an advertisement as a Slashdot article, it's the spirit of the submission that leads to the likely response. In this case the submission basically argues that one should use a "cheap 128MB video card" as RAM, yet in my neck of the woods I can buy over a GB of DDR333 RAM for less than I can buy a 128MB videocard. It just was a really nonsensical way of wording that.
I used a similar technique on my XT compatible after I upgraded it with a VGA card with 256KB of RAM on it (long after everyone had thrown away their XTs). So long as you managed to avoid writing into the visible screen, a lot of it could be used for storage (with a bit of work on the page selection registers). I still have that machine. It's got 640k on the main board, 256k on the VGA, and 2 MB on an EMS 4.0 board. (2.875 MB total) There were times when I used every byte.
Of course there's a big difference between boosting a maxed out XT and expanding the capacity of your P4 2.8Ghz from 2GB to 2.064GB.
Support SETI@home
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Haha. What a loser.
I remember some guy saying:
"640KB ought to be enough for everybody"
Think about the fact that a old of older pentium 1/socket7/super7 motherboard chipsets can't handle caching about 64 meg of ram. As a result if you add more ram the system may slow down because the L2 cache can't address about 64. Also, simms tend to be expensive. Now if you take a old pentium for a router or fileserver and you have a few old 4 meg or so video cards that X might not support anyways you can configure them as swap devices which a) you don't have to worry about slowing down the system due to L2 caching addressing limits b) swapping to ram devices is a hell of a lot faster than swap. This hack allows you to add some more life to a few older systems at the cost of a few pci slots.
I know this hack isn't great for newer systems but I have plenty of older boxes that can take advantage of this nicely.
auto262814@hushmail.com
I still think getting that REO Speedwagon tatoo was a bad idea. First of all, it's way too garish, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Second, it's so far down on your forearm that you're going to have to wear long-sleeved shirts to work from now on.
You really have to watch what you do when you've been drinking, man.
The guy probably spent *days* figuring this thing out, and, for what? Who will use this? What value does it provide? It's a cool hack, sure, but it serves no point. If you're going to hack something, at least make the end result worthwhile.
Some people love hacking their cars, but they don't use their gas tank to hold their washer fluid simply because it's possible to do so.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'd like to point out how well this speaks of the Linux kernel. By making the architecture generic and orthagonal, it allows you to do cool (if useless) stuff like this. Contrast this to Windows, where every API is extremely specifc, and you'll realize why Linux/UNIX is infinately better.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Finally! I can put my stacks and stacks of C64s to good use! I'll just make them into a "huge" MTD!
Some assembly required.
[Error 407: No signature found]
Yeah, useless shite like this is really cool. Plus you CAN do the same thing in Windows, if you know the API's and have a clue. Stupid kid. Learn DirectX. Learn how to spell. Then get a life.
How the f*ck can a penis look feminine?! :-)
Although Alan Kay et. al. designed the Xerox Alto to use 80% of its resources for the Graphical User Interface (the real innovation -- understanding that the purpose of the computer is its user interface), SmallTalk needed extra memory and used the bottom part of the screen video memory for its stack. As a result, you could see when something crashed or went into infinite recursion.
Have you ever stimulated your anus? It can feel quite good, even to heterosexuals.
I used this trick long long times back. I was a unix programmer but was using DOS based gateway so that I can use the novell servers in NYNEX ( you may remember who NYNEX was ). I was running short of memory by about 10 - 20K bytes and finally used this video ram for keeping my data structure. There were about 11 TSRs you needed to load to get IP and IPX stack going on DOS.
If your voice mail boxes work even today ( unless they threw away the code
Anyway, these are not the brightest momenst of my programming life but sure was interesting.
Just kidding. No one would be nasty and put viral code where no scanner has gone before.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The AGP deal is a driver problem, not an issue with AGP or PCI itself.
...at 0xA000:0 on IBM-compatibles, like some stealth-viruses going from MBR->main mem did, IIRC.
Oh great, must wait two minutes. How queer.
Basically Apple is finding a use for all of that VRAM while users are futzing around not playing 3D games. Granted, it's finding interesting ways to accelerate 2D video and using the AGP to pull from main RAM as well, but it's in the same sprit as stuffing random data in there.
Rather than buy an extra card for this purpose, the question to ask is how much of that 128MB am I using day-to-day. If the answer is *none* (as Apple determined) then this is a good thing.
subst. if you *REALLY* want memory as a drive. UGH.
wow! 128 megs of ram! for the low low price of only $400!!!! yeah, maybe in 1994!
I've been reading slashdot for a year or two now and I can tell that no human touches submissions before they are posted. The frequently maligned 'slashdot editor' that does not do any spell/grammar checking is probably vi or emacs, not any human. I think it is likely a legal dodge that submissions are not remangled before braodcasting, leaving the liability of such information at the feet of the original submittor.
..thank you for not moderating it above 2. It's not interesting. It's not insightful. It's barely funny and - oh my gawd - it isn't a troll.
A score of two is just about right. How about that poster-sets-max-score option, developers?
Mod the parent up. The original poster was a fucking tool.
I've often wondered why operating systems today require so much RAM in the first place. Most people just want to browse the web, check their email, and perhaps play some music. Why does Windows, or any other OS, require such resources to pull off these relatively simple tasks?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Is there any way to recruit the GPU as a second CPU to speed up my kernel compiles? Now THAT would be a truly cool hack!
Spammenot.
i think this technique is for the geel of it, not really for the practicality.
Never heard this one before. If it's a typo you may have just coined new jargon.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
who will have spare VRAM after installing Doom 3?
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Half the hacks posted on Slashdot tend to be next to useless anyways.
And the other half are kind of like modern art. You know, the sort of thing where -- if you understand it -- the only reasonable response is: "What the fuck? That's pretty cool."
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
> I was a (potential) moderator in this discussion, but posting this will lose me that right.
> I keep seeing the offer of crack for moderators.
> Where do I go to get mine?
[Shrug] Talk to one of the other moderators, they seem to have quite a bit available judging by some of the mods tonight.
Hey, come on, give the guy a break! He is Polish, after all.
/me dodges thrown fruit. (I'm Polish too, so don't get your panties all in a knot).
I have a CF card reader that works as a small drive I could certainly put the Swap file on it.
upto a 512 mb, it's slower than ram, but faster than a hard drive..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
My old amiga could do this. My A1200 had 2 megs of vram and when its 8 megs of fast ram was used up the system would often start moving into that memory. Thing is it slowed down the computer considerably.
Even my A3000 can do this with Cybervision (RTG software) once fast ram was used up it could use the memory on the video card as zorro expansion memory (ie memory attached to the system expansion bus).
Neat thing was it did this all dynamically and automatically - without you having to specify space or anything.
I can tell that no human touches submissions before they are posted
... I've had story titles changed between submission and posting, fortunately I haven't had errors introduced on my behalf <touch wood>
Have you ever submitted a story and had it accepted? The editors do touch them. There are numerous examples of the submitter posting a comment apologising for the errors that have been introduced.
And this isn't just hearsay
...at least supposedly.
Unfortunately editing is not one of
Slashdot's strengths.
The filesystem is the package manager
Not all AGP cards / systems have symetrical transfer rates. Some AGP combinations are quite slow reading from the card. An order of magnitude slower in some cases.
Economics as well since the cost per byte for the VRAM is considerable compared to the cost of increasing the system memory.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I don't know about anyone else in here, but I actually plan on trying to implement this. We all seem to be overlooking one great big niche here: servers. I run an AMD K6-II as my server, it has a single stick of 128 MB RAM. It also has an old 4 MB video card in an AGP 2x slot, that means I can add 4 MB of 132 MHz RAM, totalling my physical RAM out to 132 MB. No, that isn't very much, but hey, do I run X on my server?
No.
Do I have a video card sitting in my AGP slot?
Yes.
Is there a legitimate reason -not- to use that card for something at least?
NO!!!
Sure, my desktop has 512 MB RAM, and 64 MB VRAM, I don't need to dip into that extra RAM, but for my server, that's 4 more MB that I have available now before I have to access a terribly slow swap file. Besides, isn't this the main use of *NIX anyway, webserving? All modern PCs have AGP slots now, if you run your own server, and it has a PII or newer, chances are good it has AGP support, at -least- 1x. Chances are also good you have a video card lying around. So why not do something cool with it, rather than collect dust?
Just a thought guys.
They never ask themselves "Why?" before writing these nonsense articles.
now if only i could find "one of these cheap 128MB graphics cards" so I could "enjoy the speed"
Well, someone got bored one day and coded a ramdisk driver for MSDOS and GUS so that you could use the extra ram (games were only using the lowest 256 KB's) as an ramdisk.
I remember downloading that driver from an BBS back in the day; it worked ok, but since I rarely used more than a meg or two out of my 4 megs anyway it wasn't of any use.....
Stupidist news item, ever.
this may be useful for those old video cards that you never use anymore. I've got a 16MB Voodoo Banshee I don't use anymore.. I wonder if it would be possible to install it for an extra 16MB of RAM? I wouldn't be wasting a good video card then, and I have another one that I use as my primary.
I did this with my vga on my 8086 just to have a few more kb. Didn't want to do this anymore with current machines, but the use for thin clients is pretty handy. Probably will try it out.
Well, I have one AGP slot, I'm running win2k for software compatability reasons, I don't even have 64meg of ram on my card, let alone 128meg and I run graphic intensive applications.
Guess that rules me out.
One the other hand, my Linux server has a whopping 2meg of ram on it's video card - yes - I'll add that to the 512meg already there to make an amazing difference in performance !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I wonder if the author ever benchmarked this. Reading back from AGP-cards is usually horribly slow. Much much MUCH slower than writing. The article that was posted on slashdot a couple of weeks ago shows why it is a bad idea to treat the VRAM as general purpose ram.
a way to use the unused processor power of that gfx card to run an extra seti@home ;-)
This is actually a fairly common practice in Gamecube programming, only using audio ram. The GC has a measly 24 Megs of main ram and a whopping 16 Megs of audio ram. The transfer is reasonably fast, and it certainly makes it easier to port a PS2 engine which from the PS which has 32 Megs. There was an article in Game Developer not too long ago about automating this as virtual ram using the PowerPC's memory-mapping capabilities rather than the manual approach usually taken.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Don't you think it's "geek feel" of it, instead of geek appeal? Anyway, it's either a very clever typo or a new entry in the new hackers dictionary.
If you already have the card installed anyway then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a spare video card that you're not using, then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a choice between a card with more RAM and a card with less RAM, then the cost per byte may be small (positive), zero, or even negative, depending on the marketing strategies of the respective card manufacturers.
GeForce4 MX 420 PCI.
OR
Radeon 7000 PCI.
Both 64MB cards. And both with RAM that's considerably faster than EDO/FP (or even PC100 SDR SDRAM)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How much of your system RAM is running at 5-600Mhz and dual-ported?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You know, Amigas did this from day 1. And they did it better.
In an Amiga system, you had unified memory, some of which ("chip ram") was accessible to the custom chips, which primarily included the video and audio subsystems.
The standard memory allocation function call allowed you to specify which type of memory you needed to allocate -- ANY, CHIP, or FAST (fast being faster than chip ram because there were no bus contention problems, as I understand it).
Anyway, the Amiga also had a ramdisk device (accessible on your desktop as "Ram Disk", and mapped to the "RAM:" drive). This was the standard place that had the subdirectories t and clips, the temporary storage space and clipboard were mapped to, respectively.
Anyway, it was common, when programming an Amiga, to notice the hooks for warm and cold resets when reading docs. I recall many sideways glances at the system.
So I guess it was a small step to make the Recoverable Ramdisk Device (RRD:). I can't remember what I used it for specifically now, but I certainly used it, and I liked it a lot.
As a final note, since someone mentioned using the video subsystem's blitter for normal tasks... this was VERY common on the Amiga, too. The blitter was a very powerful, well-known, and well-respected feature of the machines, and so was not taken lightly. I think the standard memory copy function calls used this feature whenever possible. It was certainly used for disk-related transfers (although I'm not sure exactly how), and for any other time when it would be more beneficial.
All of this was done with a little innovation, and without the benefit of things like MMUs.
In short, Linux could learn a lot from this. And I hope it does.
just how close are current gfx boards to DSPs? I mean, I don't really know what's so special about DSPs, but I assume they're basically MIMD floating point workhorses, or something?
We've all heard of using the blitters for shifts, xors, etc. And modern chips have all these new 3d-capabilities, including some really cool programmable textures and things.
Does anyone know just how powerful all of this could be if used optimally in a system? I suspect that Apple's new approach with quartz is just scratching the surface.
I have got a Pentium 200 MMX with 128 Mb of ECC EDO, no free memory slots. It sounds quite fair to buy a 64 Mb PCI graphics card for less than $100, if I could use like 60 Mb for fast swap.
BUT: What if I put 60 MB swap on this fast VRAM-swap, and another 256 MB swap on an old, rotten and slow IDE drive? Will Linux detect that the first swap is faster and make extensive use of it, or will the slow 256 MB swap ruin my performance anyways?
Do you remember RAD: the recoverable RAM disk? You could *BOOT* from it, that was the coolest thing ever.
:-)
Also, RAM: could be a *dynamic* ram disk that got bigger and smaller on demand. Very cool.
We need a bootable/dynamic/recoverable RAM disk in the Linux kernel NOW!
Now if I can just get it to use the idle processor usage on my video card for distributed.net......
I never said that you couldn't do the same thing in Windows. I said that it speaks well of the UNIX APIs that such obscure functionality can be access through entirely generic APIs. The fact that you can just go ahead and use standard mmap functions to map random bits of memory is genuinely cool to those (like me) who value some elegence and beauty in software architecture. And thanks for the great example, by the way. DirectX is exactly what I'm talking about. Specific APIs to access generic functionality. Why should I have to use a different API to map graphics memory vs mapping regular memory vs mapping a file? Its just not clean! But it characterizes the Windows way of doing things.
PS> As for the comments about my intelligence and my spelling:
1) I've known DirectX since I was in the tenth grade. Learned Win32 just after I learned the C++ standard library.
2) I just got off summer break, it was late at night, and I was typing that on a laptop keyboard, so fuck off!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, you can use the memory from your video card as a fast storage medium. Some of you are saying that you can store files to swap around and stuff like that, video card memory is just like system memory, it goes away when turning off. Sure you can use the firmware storage but there is generally little left after you store the firmware.
Then, NO, it won't increase your system memory. If you have 128 MB RAM you still will have only 128 MB of RAM. You just will have a temporary disk where you can then create a swap partition. Kinda like adding memory if you swap a lot but technically, you will still only have 128MB RAM.
Finally if you have a 128 MB video card you will probably only get 127 MB of space from it since the card still needs memory for important things like video.
Some PC manufactures did this recently.. and called it "shared memory". I have a Monorail PC
(it was a hardware division of Corel IIRC) that
allocates (at a minimum, even with an offboard video card) 2M of the system memory for video.
It sounds like a good idea, but if you happen to run something like windows and a bad application
peeks where it oughtn't things get very nasty.
(Rainbow Screen of Death)
Were that I say, pancakes?
it's so much faster though...
also...the coolness factor is way up there.
I wonder if I could get this to work with memory from a Soundblaster AWE 32? I have an old 486 that I use, and the sound card can slot up to 32MB, which is as much memory as the system itself has. If I could use that as swap space, it should be much faster than swap space on the harddrives.