HyperMemory

HyperMemory is a technology from ATI Technologies that uses main memory as part of the total memory available to the graphics card. It is used in the Radeon product line and uses the fast data transfer of PCI-Express .

System with and without HyperMemory

To avoid a drop in performance, the graphics cards have a comparatively small, built-in memory with faster access times than the system memory, which is connected to the GPU via a 32- or 64-bit bus ( local memory ). Highly relevant data is stored in the faster, built-in memory, the others in the main memory. This technology remains hidden from the user, he cannot influence the memory management. Systems with HyperMemory are often advertised with 512 MB RAM, which only means the maximum possible memory.

The HyperMemory technology was developed to reduce costs, as the hardware effort on the graphics card itself can be reduced. This solution achieves excellent quality in the 2D area, but can also achieve useful results with modern 3D games. However, the performance cannot be compared with models that come up with a wider memory connection (128/256/512 bit) and larger, dedicated graphics memory (128/256/512/1024 MB). Graphics cards without HyperMemory can also access the main memory, but are usually not as dependent on it as HyperMemory systems with much smaller memory of their own.

A comparable technology from Nvidia is called TurboCache .

See also

• Shared memory

Web links

• AMD / ATI (eds.): HyperMemory . 2009, accessed Feb. 22, 2009 (product information page).
• Geoff Gasior: A new battle in budget graphics: ATI’s HyperMemory and NVIDIA’s TurboCache collide . On: TechReport.com, June 2, 2005. (Eng.)