vista performance and video memory

Posted By: serishema | Dec 8th, 2006 @ 5:06 AM
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#Dec 8th, 2006 @ 5:06 AM
serishema
serishema
The Last Hacker Chick
I have a laptop with intergrated video.

I don't play games, so on windows XP i had set the shared video memory amount as low as possible thinking that would mean the maximum amount of ram was available to the system to run programs, etc.

But it seems this is not a good idea on windows vista. I have an intel 915gma graphics controller which doesn't support WDDM so no areo for me. I recently increased the video memory setting to the maximum which is 128mb. I noticed that this actually seems to improve performance, not make it worse which doesn't make sense to me. The laptop also doesn't run as hot.

I thought the vista basic theme was rendered purely in software and didn't care whether you had a 4mb S3 trio 64v or a modern 3D acellerator.

Can someone in the know explain to me why this is the case.
#Dec 8th, 2006 @ 5:12 AM
Massif
Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.
Well, GDI did always use the graphics card, it was just that the GDI acceleration wasn't great - or anywhere near as flexible and useful as DirectX-type acceleration.

I am surprised that it makes much difference though - did you have a similar comparison for XP? I'd be interested to see whether XP definitely did run faster with a minimum graphics ram setup.

Totally guessing, but I'd guess that GDI uses graphics memory to load images into, so basic still uses the graphics memory and when you minimise the amount of graphics memory it's having to switch the bitmaps around in the memory a lot more.

Like I said though, that's pretty much guesswork - any gurus know?
#Dec 8th, 2006 @ 7:29 AM
GlebSuhatski
GlebSuhatski
If I recall correctly, Vista is supposed to be doing most of it's graphical rendering in video memory and using the GPU.
This is supposed to improve performance as GPUs are quite fast these days and it takes off a lot of load from the CPU.

(Edit: forgot the catch)

So if your video adapter is slow and lacks memory, performance ain't gonna be great. This is probably why increasing the shared memory helped.
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