What does the "up to" in "up to 128MB Shared Memory" mean?

Question

In the specs for some computers, it says "up to 128MB Shared Memory" for video card. I am not sure what the "up to" is referring to.

Answer 1

Shared memory indicates that you have an integrated video display on your motherboard. Stand alone graphic cards will have dedicated memory on the card and won't use your system memory (saving it for the operating system and applications). In your case you are not using a stand alone card so the video capability provided by your motherboard will "share" the system memory using up to 128 MB of the memory. This essentially means that the card could use anywhere from 1 MB to 128 MB of memory. In reality, the integrated video would likely use 32, 64, or 128 MB of your system memory. Depending on your overall memory in the system and how you use the system, this could be a less than desirable setup. The feature has become more popular lately for building budget PCs. If you intend to play a lot of videos or games, consider buying a graphics card rather than using the onboard motherboard video capabilities. This will free up the system memory for the operating system and applications.

Answer 2

I am pretty sure that it means that the memory that is used for the graphics and video on the computer is shared with the ram, this will decrease the ram by using some of it for the graphics. With graphics cards they have their own memory so they are not shared with the ram, for better smoother gaming shared memory isn't that good.

Answer 3

it means you must share the memory of your Ram so you need 256 RAM becuase when you use your PC there a lot of programs are starts with your windows in this case if you have for example 256 of memory and the system is take 20 Megabyte and antivirus takeing 6 megabyte ... ect the rest for example 99 MegaByte here you can't share becuase you havn't enough memory try to add more Rams or change it to 512 if you playing games.
there are another type of memory it is your vedio cart memory if your cartvedio hasn't a memory it share her memory form your RAM for example if you have an Interne cartgraphic and you have 128 of ram it share 32 or less that happen with an old matherboards but if your cartgraphic have itself memory like look Nvedia carts maybe he has 128 or more :)

Answer 4

You have your RAM on your motherboard and the video card shares that.You can go into your BIOS and set how much your video card can get.You can let it Use 128mb of your system memory at the MAX.hope this helps.

Answer 5

It means that the computer does not have any dedicated graphics memory. Instead, it borrows a portion of the RAM for whatever graphics processing it needs to do, hence the term "shared memory". When it comes to graphics performance, computers with shared graphics memory are greatly inferior to computers with dedicated graphics memory.