19 What's VRAM? (Macintosh hardware)
Description
This article is from the Macintosh hardware FAQ, by Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@shock.njit.edu with numerous contributions by others.
19 What's VRAM? (Macintosh hardware)
Video RAM is where the computer stores the images displayed on your
screen. On some earlier Macs with built-in video (Mac 128, IIci)
this was kept in main memory. However it's considerably more
efficient and faster to store the screen image in its own separate
RAM. Generally the more VRAM you have the more colors or shades of
gray you can display and the larger the monitors you can use. The
chart below shows the number of colors that can be displayed at a
given resolution with the specified amount of VRAM. Monitor size has
no direct relation to the amount of VRAM required though larger
monitors normally support higher resolutions. Larger monitors just
have fewer dots per inch than smaller monitors with the same
resolution. Also note that simply because a particular video card or
Mac has sufficient VRAM to support a given number of colors doesn't
mean that it actually can though more modern cards and monitors
typically do support several resolutions.
Resolution 512x342 640x480 832x624 1024x768 1152x870 1280x1024 VRAM 256K 256 16 16 512K 32768 256 256 16 16 768K 32768 32768 256 256 16 16 1024K 16777216 16777216 32768 256 256 16 2048K 16777216 16777216 16777216 32768 32768 256 4096K 16777216 16777216 16777216 16777216 16777216 32768
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