[brettt777]

I recently upgraded my PC to a 2.66GHZ P4 on an MSI 645 combo mainboard. I have been trying to run some newer games on this system and almost every one of them locks up or won't start. I found out today quite by accident that they are only seeing less than 32mb of video RAM, even though the Voodoo 5500 has 64mb. When I start the machine up the video bios shows 64mb of RAM like it should, but when I look in the Direct X 9 diagnostics, it shows only 30.5mb, AND...it shows that AGP acceleration is not available even though it is an AGP card. I am planning on upgrading to an ATI Radeon 9600SE soon, but I wanted to use the Voodoo on another PC (Athlon 1GHZ that I use to use) for network gaming. PLEASE HELP!!!

Frustrated!

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Welcome Brett and Merry Christmas!

Nothing you can do about it. The Voodoo 5500 has dual cores, and splits the 64MB of memory between them. It's like having two 32MB cards on one chip (pretty advanced for it's day). You may have to upgrade sooner than you'd planned.

[admin]

Welcome Brett and Merry Christmas!

Nothing you can do about it. The Voodoo 5500 has dual cores, and splits the 64MB of memory between them. It's like having two 32MB cards on one chip (pretty advanced for it's day). You may have to upgrade sooner than you'd planned.

[brettt777]

So does that mean it will never show the full 64mb in direct x? And why does the AGP show as not available? Is that just a function of it's age too?

[admin]

So does that mean it will never show the full 64mb in direct x?

Correct. DirectX can only see one chip at a time, and reports what it sees.

And why does the AGP show as not available? Is that just a function of it's age too?

AGP Acceleration isn't available. This is a feature set of AGP introduced after this card. It obviously uses the AGP slot (Advanced Graphic Port), it just doesn't use AGP Acceleration. It really doesn't provide much of a performance boost anyway.

An interesting side bar. AGP was introduced as a way to let the graphics card share system memory. It's increased bandwidth was supposed to decrease the cost of video cards by sharing system memory. As you know, this never happened. Graphics cards require higher speed memory, and more bandwidth then either the AGP interface or system memory could provide. So, mfgs just kept building memory and memory controllers into their cards.