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I just came across this in Windows:

Display driver properties

It's saying that almost 4GB of system memory is being used as graphics memory (in addition to the 2GB on the card itself, which is already plenty). I thought this only happened for inexpensive graphics cards and/or integrated graphics chipsets. What's going on?

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Nothing's wrong here. Your card basically has HyperMemory (although I don't think they use that term anymore). It can't have this memory if a host process needs it so it's not going to slow down your system any except in some very unlikely situations.

You're right about the association between this feature and low end graphics cards but now days even expensive ones have it in some form or another.

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I'm not afraid of it taking my system memory - I'm more concerned that if it ever does use system memory, that must be WAY slower than using the on-board video memory. So, I'm surprised that it is set up in a way that would ever allow the use of system memory, even if it wasn't being used by anything else. – Greg May 4 '11 at 13:24
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