HyperMemory was a brand for ATI's method of using the motherboard's main system

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

as part of or all of the video card's

video memory Video random-access memory (VRAM) is dedicated computer memory used to store the pixels and other graphics data as a framebuffer to be rendered on a computer monitor. It often uses a different technology than other computer memory, in order to b ...

on their line of

Radeon Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tech ...

video cards and

motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

chipsets. It relies on new fast data transfer mechanisms within

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

. However, to make up for the inevitably slower system RAM with a video card, a small high-bandwidth local framebuffer is usually added to the video card itself. This can be noted by the one or two small RAM chips on these cards, which usually have a 32-bit or 64-bit bus to the

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

. This small local memory caches the most often needed data for quicker access, somewhat remedying the inherently high-latency connection to system RAM. The local and system memory areas are not noticeably separate to the user and often HyperMemory solutions are advertised as having as much as 4096 MB RAM when this is actually referring to the potential use of system RAM. HyperMemory offers significant cost reduction to low-end video cards because of the reduction in trace complexity on the video card PCB, and a reduction in the amount of RAM needed on the card. The solution offers excellent performance for 2D acceleration tasks while also maintaining adequate memory speed capable of playing some modern 3D game titles with reduced quality. A video card with HyperMemory typically is slower in 3D benchmarks than a similar video card which has its own discrete video memory. Video cards implemented with HyperMemory usually bore the ''HM'' or ''LE'' suffix, for further details, see ATI Video Card Suffixes.

External links

AMD technologies
{{AMD graphics ATI Technologies

See also

External links