What Is Hyper Memory on a Graphics Card?

HyperMemory is a technology used in some video cards.

HyperMemory is a technology created by ATI and used in some of their graphics cards. The technology is designed to enhance the video memory available to your graphics card, boosting the graphical performance of your video card.

Function

HyperMemory is designed to boost the graphical performance of your graphics card by using some of your computer's random access memory as graphics memory. For example, if the graphics card has 256 MB of HyperMemory, it has 256 MB of shared memory taken directly from your RAM. Such cards typically feature some dedicated graphics memory, but they usually don't offer as much dedicated graphics memory as cards without the technology.

TurboCache Memory

ATI's major competition, NVIDIA, has a similar technology they call TurboCache Memory. While the different names may cause confusion, TurboCache memory and HyperMemory do nearly the exact same thing.

Considerations

While the technology allows for cheaper video cards with less dedicated graphics memory, shared system memory is typically slower. So if cost isn't an issue, consider a graphics card with 512 MB of dedicated graphics memory instead of one with 256 MB of dedicated memory and 256 MB of HyperMemory.

References

• AMD: ATI HyperMemory
• CNet Asia: What is HyperMemory? TurboCache Memory?
• Hardware Secrets: TurboCache and HyperMemory