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Convert Unneeded VRAM Into A Storage Device

Posted by timothy on from the welcome-to-the-bizarroworld dept.

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."

4 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. speed? by awing0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:Old School DOS Memory Managers by Safety+Cap · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ~create a handful more conventional memory beyond the 640k~
    During one QA session with QEMM 6.x, we managed to create something in the neighborhood of 900k (!) conventional memory. If memory serves, the trick was to stealth the roms out with QEMM, copy command.com onto Kernl386.exe and fire up Win 3.1 (if any of you punks who didn't live on the top floor of 150 Pico remember different, please chip in).
    --
    Yeah, right.
  3. Re:What the hell can I do with that? by not_cub · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yes there are. I attempted to write a program to find the weak Schur numbers using this (I needed to bitshift bit arrays larger than 32-bits a lot, and I figured a way that a video card could do this well, especially on this problem). The real problem with this approach was the bandwidth back to the processor mentioned in a slashdot article not so long ago. Most consumer video cards just aren't designed to send data back to the processor fast.

    not_cub

    --
    q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
  4. Isn't this what Quartz Extreme is all about? by JohnsonWax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.