The panel nVidia and in the Task Manager shows the "Shared video memory" of size 8 GB. I have 6 GB graphics card and 16 GB of RAM. Can someone explain this to me?
Never mind, these are memory pools for automatic management of resources by the Direct3D 9/10/11 runtime, a relict of the Direct3D 6 driver interface which carried over to Direct3D 9 and then DXGI/WDDM architecture in Vista. "Dedicated video" is the complete onboard local video memory, mapped into CPU address space and shared over the PCI bus; "shared system" is system memory that holds resources ready to be swapped into the video memory and it's limited to half of available RAM. These are what the Task Manager shows you on the GPU tab as "dedicated" and "shared". "Dedicated system" memory pool was once allocated by UMA notebook platforms with dedicated discrete GPUs but no local video memory; it's not used for current integrated CPUs (which repord "dedicated video) or desktop discrete cards, so it's long obsolete. "Total video memory" is the sum of all pools. Direct3D12 runtime does not automatically allocate resources to memory pools and requires the programmer to explicitly manage video memory with budgets and resource residency.
