Noob question #2

So, if I’ve got 8 GB of RAM in my PC and I swap out the GPU for something like a GeForce GTX with 4 GB of its own VRAM, would I be totally wrong if I told people I have 12 GB of RAM?

Charles Ramirez5 said:So, if I’ve got 8 GB of RAM in my PC and I swap out the GPU for something like a GeForce GTX with 4 GB of its own VRAM, would I be totally wrong if I told people I have 12 GB of RAM?

Technically yes, but practically... not really.

Yeah.

Yeah. That’s just extra video memory for the GPU—it doesn't touch your actual system RAM at all.

alright, thanks guys.

That’s just not quite right 🙂

Think of it this way—you can basically view a graphics card as its own little dedicated computer (I mean, it’s got its own chip, processor, memory, and all that good stuff...)

So, if we’re following your logic, what happens then? Do we start counting the CPU's cache memory too—like the L1, L2, or L3 levels?

Or maybe even the drive's cache?

And so on...

🙂

Look, you’ve got your VRAM and then you’ve got your system RAM. You mentioned having 4 GB of VRAM on the GPU and 8 GB of system RAM, but those two capacities are totally different beasts and don't have anything to do with each other.