Video Ram vs System ram

Alright, Im sure this has been answered, but i couldnt find a thread containing it, and ite been bugging me a long time.
vid card, ati x200 mobile, 128 dedicated
processor: 64 athalon amd, 3200, ~2ghz
"auto detect" sets it to almost max, AA and all
i run gw at lowest because of terrible lag loading into maps, and big battles. the lag slows after a few seconds, but it is really annoying.

Ok: I have 128mb video ram, dedicated to the graphics card.
i have a seperate 512 for .... stuff?

When i minimize GW, it clears my screen slowly working downward, slowly revealing my background. then the screen refreshes, and the icons show up.
it does this sometimes on minimizing internet browser, or WMP.


ty for any help
is this ram, or v-ram, or something else entirely?


and slightly off the current question, what is the difference between vram and normal ram? one controlls video and one controlls loading stuff?

the CPU controlls what the ram does .

vram is usually much faster ram than system ram to handle what the CPU tells it to do

example for me is my video card ram is DDR3 at 1000 mhz (effective) and my system ram is DDR at 400 effective which is a big difference

ram does what it is told and does not control any function except display what it is told to display (at the best speed it can)

your video card is used to store textures.. you can store textures on the boards memory also (go into your bios- that's what apg aperture is for.. you usually want to set this to the size of your video card- your case 128) but like lov said it's slower to access from system memory unless your using an amd 64 (memory controllers on the 64 are fast enough to keep up).. what your experiencing is swap though- it has to load the textures being used for the current scene and there's just not enough overall memory to hold the game AND textures so it has to put what's not being used at the time onto your harddisk (swapfile).. set the aperture, defrag, have a good size page file (around 1200-1200 is fine for your setup) and shutdown anything that's using large amounts of system memory before launching GW and see if that helps.. there's program called tweak xp you might want to check out too- it actually has a one button tweak nowdays and you don't have to know anything

so, adding system ram speeds up what exactly?
I.E.....I move up to 1 gig, what will change?