windows 7windows 8
I just bought a Samsung Series 7 laptop but I have no idea how much VRAM the graphics card has. This is an NVIDIA OPTIMUS card. I am using Windows 7 and will upgrade to 8 within the hour.
I switched from Mac to PC. So its not familiar to me. I am sorry that you guys know where to look and think this question is very trivial. Someone is selling me his laptop and claims it has 1GB VRAM. The stock # says it should have 512MB and I wanted to verify these details.
Note: As it stands it appears this is only valid for Nvidia cards, GPU-Z does not appear to be able to get this information on Ati cards.
You can see how much video memory is in use on any reasonably new Nvidia graphics card using GPU-z, which you can get from http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
For example my card shows:
Note the "Memory Used" field. I believe this should be available on almost all current cards, though I don't have an Ati card to check.
Everything starts fine, but gets progressiveness worse after about 10 minutes of play, and I left it go for an hour once, and it was REALLY bad. This is bizarre.
You pretty much nailed it down as a heat/throttling issue right here.
When performance drops off over time but isn't associated with a crash it's very commonly related to heat build-up in the system and the components throttling themselves to prevent overheating. Software possibilities were pretty much eliminated with the re-install you did.
It might be worth looking into cleaning the cooling fins if it's not been done recently. I don't know how easy or difficult the MBP is to work on but with other hardware I might even suggest re-applying the thermal paste with some high-quality material but how much difference that can make will depend entirely on how good the existing material is.
Best Answer
Since you have an Nvidia card, you should be able to get that information from the Nvidia control panel.
Alternatively if for whatever reason you don't have that available to you, you can look at the system information to get the numbers.