Question: 32bit OS and 4GB GPU RAM - What happens?

[NovaSphere]

You might create a black hole and reproduce the big bang, you will make LHC look like a tiny lab experiment!

[manwithnoname]

[geeky]
In theory it would not necessarily mean 4GB limit, it would depend on the hardware architecture and the OS - that's something that stuck in my head for CS101 architecture from a good few years ago. It all to do with the way virtual address is implemented each process would be limited to 4GB but these can be mapped physically within a larger address space.
[/geeky]

But I'd go for this big bang theory: the system ram is completely ignored, windows is loaded up into the video card memory and everything works fine until you play that game in 5120x4096 resolution with AA, then the game 'draws data' all over the windows area and the system crashes.

[Zadock]

The dead rise to reclaim the earth?

[kalniel]

But I'd go for this big bang theory: the system ram is completely ignored, windows is loaded up into the video card memory and everything works fine until you play that game in 5120x4096 resolution with AA, then the game 'draws data' all over the windows area and the system crashes.

I'd go with something like that too.

The situation is certainly nicer for XP than Vista.

[directhex]

all "windows uses GPU RAM" theories are somewhere near the "higgs boson discovered" for likelihood

[kalniel]

Sorry - misread - I was taking it as "virtual address space reserved for GPU ram"

[2Cold Scorpio]

Heh, I always wondered what would happen if you did that. I assumed the world (or at least your PC) would grind to a halt...or somehow, the entire OS would run off of VRAM (!), which I really doubted.

Looks like I was right. I think ATI (and nVidia) oughta warn users about this; it isn't just the power-users doing this sort of thing anymore. ^_^