ATI Graphics Card Question

[Nyll Bergbahn]

My System Information tool says I have an ATI Radeon 512MB graphics card, so does the ATI Catalyst Control Centre. This is very strange as I purchased and installed a ATI Radeon X1550 256MB AGP graphics card. Second Life is detecting 512MB and has set the Hardware Settings Texture Memory to 512MB, too high if I really only have 256MB.

Either ATI supplied a 512MB card by mistake (there is a Radeon X1550 512MB AGP but not by the same manufacturer) or my system is erring. Is that possible?

So my question is: does SL detect actual memory or does it take it from what ATI Catalyst or System Info says?

Nyll

[Ansariel Hiller]

If SL would really try to detect the memory itself, it would be required to run with administrator priviledges and since it doesn't it will assume what it's presented by the graphics card driver.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

Thanks for that explanation Ansariel. I would assume ATI Catalyst is capable of detecting one of its own units correctly so maybe it is a 512MB card. It would explain why my computer is running so hot when in Second Life. I'll try and find a utility that checks graphic card memory.

Nyll

[Ansariel Hiller]

Those memory available display was IMHO always buggy on AGP cards because of the "great" feature idea of AGP cards to use additional main memory for textures. Because of that, you should find in you computer's BIOS a setting "AGP aperture size" somewhere. And if I'm not completely wrong, this was by default either set to 256 MB or 128 MB.

[Steve Beck]

It is very possible the manufacturer have supplied you a 512MB card by mistake. Once I took some memory (RAM), but it come with a lot more RAM than I bought. However, the only way to know that is by using a tool like CPU-Z.

SL does not recognize all kind hardware in your machine. It seems that it detects only those hardware listed on its code. LL has to improve that someway.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

Is what you mean by buggy that the AGP Aperture memory (system RAM) shows up as Graphics Card memory? I reset the AGP Aperture BIOS to 256MB from 128MB a while back but whether I have it at 32MB, 64MB, 128MB or 256MB it doesn't affect the 512MB shown in ATI Catalyst or Sys Info after restarts. I've reset it to 128MB as that should be high enough.

CPU-Z says I have a 512MB card and graphics AGP 8x supported. SiSoftware Sandra says I have a 256MB card and current transfer rate of 8x too. I'm not really any the wiser!

Anyway, thanks Ansariel and Steve for your assistance. I'm not going to worry too much about it as Second LIfe is running reasonably well considering my system is nearly 6 years old (except for the graphics card).

Nyll

[Ansariel Hiller]

Actually I don't know exactly if and if yes in what cases the shown available memory is affected by the aperture size. I only remember that if you use different tools you get a varying results with AGP cards. The only reliable source is if the graphics card posts a message during boot.