Something I never understood, why do graphics cards usually have small amounts of memory on them? I know memory isn't everything, but surely it's pretty cheap just to load 4gb of memory on any old graphics card?
Why can’t graphics cards just have more memory
graphics cardmemory
Best Answer
It's not cheap, per se, but it could be done, yes. It'd raise the price of the card, but it could be done.
Question is, though, why bother? If your card isn't fast enough to actually need 4GB of VRAM, it's wasted money, what's the point. You can have as many textures as you like, but unless you can actually pull that 4GB of data through for every single frame, it's wasted.
The more important reason, however, is that in a 32-bit OS, VRAM gets first dibs on the 4GB addressable space. If you have 4GB of VRAM, that leaves precisely nothing for anything else, and your machine wouldn't even boot. Bummer!