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#11
Hi there
the easy way to describe this (the techies will hate me but sometimes over complex language doesn't enhance basic understanding of the principle).
Computer memory can be considered as the Gas Tank on a Motorbike or a car. The Graphics card is the engine -- the more gas you have in the tank the longer the motor will run for.
Obviously it's not as simple as that as if the main memory is shared between the graphics card and the rest of the computer system the OS itself will have to do a sort of Policeman's job of deciding which processes get access to shared memory and how long for --this will inevitably suspend other processes leading to slowing down of the system.
Most decent Graphics cards have their own memory and processor so they only need to make use of a minimal amount of computer central memory. Since a 64 bit system can have approx 2 ** 64 (2+E64 or two raised to power 64 ) bytes you won't run into any "constraint of addresses" on your machine -- value is 16 Exabytes of physical RAM -- not that you'd get anywhere near that limit -- I think the Linux OS itself currently has a limit of something like 132 TB while windows has a smaller limit -- not sure what but large enough. Since most domestic computers rarely have more than 15 GB RAM and laptops often as little as 8GB of main memory the address space / memory range of a video card won't be an issue.
Cheers
jimbo
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