HyperMemory

HyperMemory is a technology from ATI Technologies to the use of main memory as part of the total memory available to the graphics card. It is used in the Radeon product line and uses the fast data transfer of PCI Express.

To avoid performance degradation, have the graphics cards over a comparatively small, built-in memory with faster access times than the main memory of the system, a 32 - is tethered or 64-bit bus to the GPU ( engl. local memory). Data of high relevance are stored in the faster, more built-in memory, the other in the main memory. The user remains hidden this technique, it can not affect the memory management. Systems with HyperMemory are often advertised with 512 MB ​​RAM, which provides only the maximum possible memory is meant.

The HyperMemory technology is designed to reduce costs because the hardware complexity can be reduced to the graphics card itself. This solution achieves excellent quality in 2D, but can achieve useful results even with modern 3D games. However, the performance is not comparable with models with a wider memory bus ( 128/256/512 bits) and greater, dedicated graphics memory come up ( 128/256/512/1024 MB). Although graphics cards without HyperMemory can also access the main memory, but are usually not so heavily dependent on how HyperMemory systems with a significantly smaller dedicated memory.

A similar technology from Nvidia is called TurboCache.