I put together a machine recently and I noticed something kindof unusual (and cool), and I’m not exactly sure how or why it happened.
I build a computer with 4gb of ram, and I installed windows 7 on it. For a video card, I put in a GeFoirce GTX 260 with 1.7gb of ram, and installed touch FTE. everything works great, but when I load touch and check out gpu ram usage, it reports 3.7gb of GPU ram! how is that possible? does windows 7 somehow allocate system ram for the GPU? i haven’t tried load-testing it with enough TOPS to see if that’s actually usable, but either way it’s interesting.
Interesting, we are testing a few machines here with Windows 7 and we’ll see if we can figure this out for you. We plan of fully supporting Windows 7, so if any issues that come up please let us know, good or bad!
The GPU has always had access to the CPU RAM as a way of having extra cache space (even in Windows XP). How fast this is is very dependent on the hardware and the rendering setup. Generally I try to stay below the GPUs native RAM limit for the amount of data used at any given time (so it’s not thrashing the memory going to both GPU and CPU RAM).
I guess Windows 7 is just reporting it’s GPU memory differently than other OSs.