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I would like to know about ways to enhance a video (graphic) card performance and/or increase its memory (perhaps virtualizing memory, I personally don’t know if it’s possible).

For over-clocking or flashing its bios I know it depends on the video card model. Anyway, I have an Nvidia Geforce 9400M on my laptop (which I want to enhance, since I found not viable to replace it with a new model) (the laptop processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, its installed phisical memory is 4 GB, has 100 GB of free HD space).

Update: Do you know a way of virtualizing or emulating graphic cards??

Thanks for your help.

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I would like to know about ways to enhance a video (graphic) card performance

You have 2 choices:

  1. Overclock your graphics card
  2. Upgrade the graphics card

Overclocking: Overclocking is probably the most common way of boosting performance. While it is possible to overclock on stock hardware, you are likely to run into the wall sooner than later. Adding to this is the fact that your is a laptop graphics processor and space comes at a premium in laptops, I'd recommend against this.

Upgrading: This may or may not be possible/feasible - depending on your laptop manufacturer, the motherboard, the way the graphics card is attached.

Other than the above two,

Increase its memory: Increasing the amount of memory on a graphics card will NOT increase performance, since the memory is used to store texture data and not for processing.

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The amount of memory might not be related directly to graphic card performance, but I think it's directly related with 3d capabilities. – Mario Aug 25 '10 at 20:26
@Mario: no, that's not right. It doesn't matter if a low end card has 128MB of graphics memory or 4GB - it will not improve the card's processing ability – Sathya♦ Aug 25 '10 at 20:55
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Look at it this way. It doesn't matter if you have a shotglass or a bathtub, there's only so quickly you can drink through a straw. – Tofystedeth Aug 25 '10 at 21:47
@Sathya, I never said I wanted to have a really low end GPU + More Memory. I just wanted to said that memory helps on 3d and on rendering process (to a capable 3d GPU). Obviously the GPU clock rate and bandwidth must be paired by the amount and speed of memory (if that isn't the case there could be bottlenecks). – Mario Aug 26 '10 at 15:15
Have you heard about virtualizing or emulating GPUs?? I think that's where my research is tending. – Mario Aug 26 '10 at 15:19
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