Will allocating more RAM to my 5920 G's NVIDIA GeForce 8600 m GT graphics card improve performance ?

Hello

I have a Acer Aspire 5920G (Vista Home with SP1) laptop which I use for general purposes as well as occasional DVDs and a little games.

With the kind help from members of this forum I upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB a couple of months ago but of course my 32bit Vista only uses 3GB which leaves 1GB unused. The laptop's processor is a T7300 at 2.00GHz.

Its NVIDIA GeForce 8600 M GT graphics card (with latest driver installed) seems to work quite well but a friend who I occasionally game with said I could go into the BIOS and allocate the unused 1GB of RAM to the card which will improve its performance.

I googled this to check but the articles I read (with my limited technical knowledge!!) seemed to say that allocating extra RAM in the BIOS does not work with dedicated cards and attempts to do so could in fact reduce performance.

I would be very grateful if an expert in this excellent forum who is knowledgeable about graphics cards could please clarify the situation for me.
Basically can I go into the BIOS to increase the card's RAM allocation to improve performance as my friend suggested or is this a waste of time and/or dangerous ?

Looking at the NVIDIA system info, I see that it says Total Available Graphics is 1535MB but dedicated video memory is 256MB. Does this support what my friend says or is it unrelated ?

Many thanks in advance for help and assistance.

 

vRAM is just where the images are stored, increasing its size wont really help with the performance.

Unless of course you somehow run out of dedicated video memory which will make the GPU use the slower system RAM instead (turbocache)

 

Thanks for the prompt reply.

So I guess from what you say is that its a waste of time and my friend (who is of course not an expert) has got it kinda wrong. Is that correct ?

 

Correct. When you're out of vRAM your card allocates system RAM automatically so there is no need to increase the amount manually. This kind of situation(out of vRAM) will rarely happen anyway(under normal circumstances) so I'd leave these settings by default.

 

Many thanks for your prompt replies and all your help.

Its always good to consult the experts at Acer laptop Forum rather than trust well-meaning but less expert friends !!

Bye for now !!