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

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

as part of or all of the video card's

framebuffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern ...

memory 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 mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expand ...

chipsets. It relies on new fast data transfer mechanisms within

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...

. 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 to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

. 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 PCB may refer to: Science and technology * Polychlorinated biphenyl, an organic chlorine compound, now recognized as an environmental toxin and classified as a persistent organic pollutant * Printed circuit board, a board used in electronics * ...

, 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