How do video cards work? *As in is the memory used pending on what shows up on the screen?

same as above. Say i'm playing World of Warcraft, which the recommended specs for a video card say like 64mb w. the hardware transform and lighting...the video card would only use 64 mb of video ram at that time right since that game is the only thing that appears on the screen at the time? Or am I mistaken? Please tell me...thanks in advance!

How do video cards work? *As in is the memory used pending on what shows up on the screen?
I'm a little unclear on the question, but hopefully the following will include the answer you are looking for.





Memory on video cards (in general) is used to hold a framebuffer, that is the image being drawn on the screen.





Modern video cards with 3D capability (compared to the older VGA cards) use the framebuffer for normal desktop work as well. But for 3D applications like WoW they use the video memory to hold texture bitmaps (like grass and stone), and geometry information (like the positions of the polygons which make up a building).





It is possible for both modes to be used together, like when one runs WoW in a window on the desktop. The DirectX driver decides what information needs to be placed in video memory, and swaps things in and out of the main system memory as they are needed.





There are some cards which share memory between the video processor and the main system. This is slower than a card which has all of its memory on-board, but is less expensive. A card like this might use 64M of real video memory and another 64M of system RAM. I would avoid these cards unless you have no choice.