Types Of Video Memory

There are various types of video memory in usage. Generally, the memory capacity of most of the modern videos is ranging from 128 Mb to 8 GB. The video memory would require to be accessed by the GPU. During the year 2003, the video memory was mainly based upon DDR technology. More often, video memory is one among the most misunderstood components of the video cards. It is to be noted that types of video memory do not equate to the video speed. While the video speed is determined by 2 factors: chipset on video card and Input-Output slot that is holding the video card, the video memory would determine the ability for displaying the certain color depth as well as the resolution.

The most common types of video memory in use are:

VRAM:

These types of video memory are special purpose memory being used by various video adapters. Unlike the conventional types of RAM, these types of video memory could be accessed by two various devices simultaneously. The VRAM type of video memory could be expanded as ‘video RAM’. This video memory would enable the RAMDAC for accessing the video RAM for the purpose of screen updates at the same time while the video processor providing new data. The VRAM type of video memory is known as yielding the better graphics performance. However, VRAM is costlier than the normal one.

WRAM:

This is the short form for ‘windows RAM’ and would support two ports. These types of video memory enable any video adapter to fetch all the contents of memory for displaying at the same time in such a way that the new bytes are pumped into the memory. This video memory would result in much faster display than it is possible with the single port RAM. These types of video memory are much similar to VRAM, but could achieve faster performance than VRAM at a lower cost. This is because the windows RAM support the addressing of the larger blocks of video memory.

RDRAM:

This could be expanded as ‘Rambus DRAM’. These types of video memory were developed by Rambus Inc. RDRAM video memory could transfer data at up to the speed of 800 MHz. Already in some of the graphics accelerator RDRAM is used instead of VRAM. Intel and Rambus are now working on a newer version of RDRAM which is called as nDRAM which would support the data transfer at the speed up to 1600 MHz. However, one of the consortiums of the computer vendors is working on an alternative architecture for video memory known as SyncLink DRAM (SLDRAM).

SGRAM:

SGRAM could be expanded as ‘Synchronous Graphic RAM’. This is one among the several other types of video memory falling into the category of ‘DRAM’. These are widely used increasingly over the video adapters and graphic accelerators. This could synchronize itself with CPU bus. These video memories have the ability to clock pace of approximately100 MHz. Moreover, SGRAM uses several types of other techniques like masked writes and block writes for increasing the bandwidth for the graphics intensive functions.

Apart from these, there are various types of video memory in usage.