Do anyone know how to make your Video Card use less memory? My current Video Card is ATI Radeon 200 Xpress(256 MB). It use to use only 64 Ram but now it's using 128 of my Ram. When I go to my computer, properties. It shows I only have 384 Ram. But really I have 512. Also each day my computer's performance is getting higher each day and it uses a huge lot of memory. I tried a disc defragment and it still used the same. Except my computer got faster. Anyone know what problem I am having? I been trying to figure out this problem since my computer got slower when I first got it.

You are shure what you are using the Radeon Card or the card on the motherboard. Your Video Card (ATI Radeon) must use his memory (256mb) BUT NOT the RAM memory of the computer!!! Maybe you need to see the BIOS Configuration? Stay shure what you use your ATI Card but not the video card on the motherboard!!!!!

The computer probably shows the free memory left out of the 512MB you've got... Try disabling some of the background services which will eat up the memory. I am sure you will have a lot of programs running in the background in the msconfig. You can solve this problem by typing msconfig in Run and services. Untick some of the services which you dont want...

Although still in my opinion 384MB is a good amount of free memory!

Thanks
Alen

Uhh... are you sure that you're looking at VRAM vs. RAM?

VRAM is video RAM, which is physically ON your video card. VRAM can only be used for video and graphical applications where a program needs to load up textures and perform graphics-related tasks.

From my understanding, if you have a dedicated video card, you are strictly limited to the VRAM that's on that card (unless the video card comes with software/utilities that allow you to share system resources to help bolster your graphical performance). If you have INTEGRATED graphics (on the motherboard), you may have integrated video memory which also shares memory with your system (your RAM). If that's the case, you can actually specify how much memory is shared by going into your BIOS and changing those values there.

However, you just told us that you have an ATI Radeon X200. Edit: Sorry, I just got shed some light that the X200 is actually an integrated solution. So you will be able to change what is shared through the BIOS as I've mentioned earlier... unless the BIOS utility sucks.

You might want to look into purchasing more RAM for your computer, since 512MB is rather meager, especially if you're running XP. (Forget Vista.) I think that, in my opinion, 2GB of RAM will suffice for ANY computer, gaming or general use (which actually can get away with 1GB for basic stuff without too much bog-time). RAM is much cheaper nowadays... and with the advent of DDR3, expect it to be even cheaper down the road.

This post has been edited by rayzoredge: Jan 30 2008, 04:50 PM