On-Board Video

[ACM]

I’ve noticed that ever since Windows 98 was released it reports my computer as having 120 Mb of RAM even though I have 128 Mb. After some experimenting I realised this was because I had an on-board video card of 8 Mb. From memory I didn’t think Windows 95 did this (although I may be wrong), if you had 128 Mb it would report 128 Mb (I think). Can anyone clarify this matter for me – that is, in the case of on-board video does the BIOS automatically subtract the total Mb of the on-board video card and then tell Windows the amount of RAM it has to play around with, making (in this case) the extra 8 Mb totally invisible to the OS?

[edge345]

Yes most on board video steals its ram from the motherboards main ram. if you add a video card and disable the onboard video it should return the 8 meg it uses from the on board ram.

[GaryRouth]

. . . and the reason you probably didn't notice it happening in Windows 95 was that a lot of the earliest tries at onboard video had discrete chips soldered onto the motherboard, and the video Ram was soldered on there too. So it wasn't shared. But motherboard makers soon found out that this made the boards very expensive to produce - and customers weren't willing to put up with the expense = especially since it was a fairly inflexible situation for future upgrades.

. . . Gary