I know it stands for Video Random Access Memory, but I cant comprehend or visualize what that means. If you can, give me some visual descriptions to help me wrap my head around it.
Thanks!
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There are several parts of your computer.
The most relevant part, is the display controller, which is usually part of your graphics card, if your computer has one. Basically, this part of your computer sends colors to the screen, one pixel at a time, top to bottom, left to right, until it fills the entire screen. And then it does it again.
Modern computers do this, by reading something called a display buffer – basically, just a list of every pixel on the screen, in order. This display buffer has to be stored in some kind of memory somewhere.
The display buffer is usually calculated by other specialized hardware, which needs its own dedicated information – a 3D renderer, for instance, needs a bunch of 3D models and object positions. This hardware is usually also on the graphics card, physically near the display controller (maybe even part of the same chip).
The thing is, the display buffer – and the information used to calculate it – are generally not the same information that the CPU uses. So, if your computer’s graphics components are far away from the CPU (e.x. if they’re on a physically separate graphics card), it’s generally easier to dedicate some memory to the graphics hardware, and put that memory close to it (and far away from the CPU). This dedicated memory is VRAM.
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