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Many modern GPUs rely on VRAM. In contrast, a GPU that does not use VRAM, and relies instead on system RAM, is said to have a unified memory architecture, or shared graphics memory. System RAM and VRAM have been segregated due to the bandwidth requirements of GPUs, [2] [3] and to achieve lower latency, since VRAM is physically closer to the GPU ...
Much the way the system BIOS provides a set of functions that are used by software programs to access the system hardware, the video BIOS provides a set of video-related functions that are used by programs to access the video hardware as well as storing vendor-specific settings such as card name, clock frequencies, VRAM types & voltages.
WDDM drivers allow video memory to be virtualized, [6] and video data to be paged out of video memory into system RAM. In case the video memory available turns out to be insufficient to store all the video data and textures, currently unused data is moved out to system RAM or to the disk. When the swapped out data is needed, it is fetched back.
Sun TGX Framebuffer. A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) [1] containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. [2]
Dual-ported video RAM (VRAM) is a dual-ported variant of dynamic RAM (DRAM), which was once commonly used to store the framebuffer in graphics adapters. Dual-ported RAM allows the CPU to read and write data to memory as if it were a conventional DRAM chip, while adding a second port that reads out data.
A GART is used as a means of data exchange between the main memory and video memory through which buffers (i.e. paging/swapping) of textures, polygon meshes and other data are loaded, but can also be used to expand the amount of video memory available for systems with only integrated or shared graphics (i.e. no discrete or inbuilt graphics ...
Each screen character is represented by two bytes aligned as a 16-bit word accessible by the CPU in a single operation. The lower (or character) byte is the actual code point for the current character set, and the higher (or attribute) byte is a bit field used to select various video attributes such as color, blinking, character set, and so forth. [6]
This implies that unless the size of a single scanline's raster data is a power of two, raster data cannot be laid out continuously in video memory. Instead, graphics modes on the CGA store the even-numbered scanlines contiguously in memory, followed by a second block of odd-numbered scanlines starting at video memory position 8,192.