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I just started Call of Duty and noticed that it took a moderate ~1.2 GiB of RAM. Then looked at the system information and noticed that I only had ~1 GiB out of my 6 GiB left.

The only explanation I can think of is that my GPU (NVIDIA Geforce 330M) is using the rest.

Is this even the explanation? And if so, how can I find out how much RAM my GPU is actually using?

Edit:

Yes, the card does have shared memory, because my laptop specifications say:

Processor: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 330M GPU with Total
Available Graphics Memory of 2263MB (max.)
Video RAM: 512MB dedicated video RAM

And yes, I was playing CoD with the highest texture quality settings.

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2 Answers

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If you were using VERY high graphics settings, you may find that it uses more than what your GPU has, and then begins using RAM from the system. You can use GPU-Z to see how much is being used. It does appear though that card only has 256mb of RAM.

Here's a little picture of all the information you can view, I took it while idling.

Sensor

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That only occures if his chip supports the shared memory archetecture. Which it does not. notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-330M.22437.0.html – soandos Jul 5 '11 at 2:04
@Simon: Thanks a lot, I'll take a look at it! – Mehrdad Jul 5 '11 at 3:18
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No its not, as the GPU uses its own RAM. I can't tell without looking at all of your running processes, but I guess those add to the missing 4GB.

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But I believe this card also uses shared memory. – emb1995 Jul 5 '11 at 1:50
Shared memory has nothing to do with the RAM for the rest of the computer. See here under advantages. And anyway, its really really tiny (48KB). – soandos Jul 5 '11 at 1:52
Btw, this card does not used shared memory: notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-330M.22437.0.html – soandos Jul 5 '11 at 2:05
Ah. Sorry; I was jumping to conclusions. – emb1995 Jul 5 '11 at 2:07
@emb1995: No, you weren't -- at least, not according to my laptop specifications PDF. I think that link is either wrong, or doesn't apply to every instance of the card. @soandos – Mehrdad Jul 5 '11 at 3:16

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