VRAM, What is it?

In the previous post, we looked at system ram and its workings, if you haven't seen it please check it out, it would be really appreciative if you do, but there's one kind of RAM we didn't mention, Video random access memory, a type of memory specifically used in graphics cards.

SO WHAT IS VRAM?

VRAM or video random access memory are memory modules on an external or discrete graphics card that are right beside the GPU. As its name states video random access memory, it just means that it stores visual data which is presented on the screen, it stores the images which will be shown on the screen and acts as a buffer between the CPU and GPU, when an image is to be shown on the screen, the image is generated and read by the processor and then written on VRAM; the data is then sent to RAMDAC (RAM digital-to-analog converter) which converts the data into an analog signal and sent to the display, and as this is happening a new frame is being processed to VRAM for a smooth and clear Frame rate.

HOW MUCH VRAM DO YOU NEED?

Well that depends on what you are doing with your system, surfing the web or surfing in a video game, that makes a tremendous difference, for that lets first look at types of GPUs

• 
  Integrated GPU - An integrated GPU is a graphical processing unit built into your CPU chip, or can also be on the Mobo in Laptops, Now these are just processing units that share the system RAM to produce an image

These GPUs are good enough for general purposes like browsing the web, watching cat videos and such, and even casual gaming which does not require much power because these aren't much powerful, as they will have a limited amount of RAM available to them and in CPU and GPU intensive tasks RAM will be used by both the CPU and GPU so that will create major bottlenecks. And also slows your system down as if you don't have a dedicated graphics card, and say you have 8GB of RAM on your system but say 2GB of that RAM is being shared with the integrated GPU, so you only will have 6GB of RAM, hence slowing your system down. 

So if you need more VRAM for your integrated GPU you can increase the shared RAM by going into the BIOS of your system, if you wanna do some graphics-intensive tasks like gaming. 

But there is a major downside here which is that System RAM is pretty slow and there are a lot of latency and bandwidth issues with that.

• 
  Discrete GPU - Now if you need to do some hefty graphics-intensive work, you might need a beefy Graphics card that can get the job done like video editing or gaming. And as the CPU is the brain of a computer, GPU or graphical processing unit is the brain of the graphics card. These graphics cards are expansion cards for your system which are inserted in PCI-Express slots on the motherboard, PCI-e is an expansion bus standard for a computer which are on a motherboard and are used to add high-speed components like Graphics cards, Wi-Fi cards or SSDs, PCI-e is a high speed with high bandwidth expansion bus in which you can insert your discrete graphics card 

          On discrete Graphics cards, as stated before, VRAM is directly on the card, and this VRAM is a lot of times faster than system RAM and is a DRAM type RAM, and as the VRAM is right beside the GPU, it minimises transmission times between the VRAM and the GPU. Modern day graphics cards use GDDR6 (Graphics Double Data Rate type 6) memory which has higher bandwidth and lower latency than DDR4 used by the system. 

Well, if you need more performance in games or wanna do video editing you are better off with at least 4GB-8GB of VRAM, if you already have a dedicated graphics card but not enough VRAM on it you can also share some of your system ram, which isn't the best thing as again system ram is slow, but if you need performance, then be ready with a fat pocket because these discrete graphics card can cost a lot if you need some good beefy performance because the flash memory used in VRAM doesn't come cheap.

The major Graphics card manufacturers are NVidia and AMD, but Intel GPUs are also a rumor to be heard of so be on the watch. 

WHAT ABOUT TYPES OF VRAM?

As with the previous post in which we stated types of RAM, there are also types of VRAM, which are SGRAM, RDRAM, WRAM, MDRAM, we will just cover the tip of the iceberg in this post, if you need more about these types of RAM, you can state it in the comments, now onto the RAM types-

• SGRAM - Like DRAM got SDRAM, VRAM also has a synchronous version which is SGRAM, synchronous graphics random access memory, it is clock synchronized so it can modify data in a single operation instead of read, write and update sequence.
• RDRAM - Rambus Dynamis RAM, it includes a Rambus bus that speeds up the transfer of data through it, with a  Data Transfer Rate (DTR) up to 800 MHz.
• WRAM - Window RAM is a high-performance VRAM, it is dual-ported and has 25% more bandwidth than standard VRAM, and is also cheaper.
• MDRAM - Multibank Dynamic RAM, is a high-performance VRAM developed by MoSys, which divides the memory into divisions of 32KB that can be accessed individually, which makes the memory transfer more efficient and increases performance. 

More about DDR4 and GDDR6 in the next post so stay tuned

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