On Sun, 2021-03-07 at 20:57 -0500, Alex wrote:
but only 2GB RAM? Won't that affect the maximum resolution?
Yes, but... It's going to depend on how the card works.
4k resolution is 3840 × 2160 pixels = 8,294,400 addressable pixels.
8,294,400 addresses × 3 (red, green, & blue colours) = 24,883,200 memory locations to store one screen of image data.
Depending on how many bits per colour, then the whole screen uses this much memory for one static screen:
× 8 bits: 199,065,600 bits (24,883,200 bytes, or 25 MB) × 16 bits: 398,131,200 bits (49,766,400 bytes, or 50 MB) × 32 bits: 796,262,400 bits (99,532,800 bytes, or 100 MB)
That's assuming a simple bitmap of the screen display, as opposed to compressed image handling (such as a 100 × 100 blue square being defined mathematically rather than just being a memory dump of the contents).
The things that are harder to calculate are how it handles moving images. How many frames does it need to be able to hold in memory? How does it do other rendering tricks (3D, for instance)? Does it decode compressed video itself (e.g. the computer hands over compressed MP4 video data to the graphics card to decompress back to RGB, passing over a small amount of data to a graphics processor with oodles of RAM all to itself).