On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 08:39:23AM -0700, sinck@owmyeye.ugive.com wrote:
> 
> Is it possible, given the increasing video ram being slapped in video
> cards these days to utilize unused vram as system ram?  For instance,
> if you're running in 80x24 text, and have a 16M or 32M board, to be
> able to hijack the memory for another lump of memory?  Or maybe use it
> as 'fast swap'?

I think it'd be a good thing to do.

It's been done the other way around... some video cards steal system
RAM as video RAM.  (That must use up a lot of bandwidth though.)

Another thing that would be interesting is find some kind of calculations
for which some video cards happen to be optimized, and write a
distributed.net type of program which can solve these kinds of problems
in offscreen VRAM.  I bet that graphics processors and supercomputers
have something in common - the ability to do some kinds of operations 
on large datasets very fast.

-- 
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