How do i monitor my graphics card ram usage?

i have a geforce 7300gt 512mb pcie. i know this sucks, i just got this because this comp was my very first build. I will be upgrading to geforce 8600 or 7600 when geforce 9 comes out since the older series are gonna be cheaper.

OK... so.... when i close all the programs, my computer idles at 800mb for ram. I got this from task manager.

I want to make sure that my graphics card is not using any of the system memory as video memory. How do i check this? I installed the latest drivers for my graphics card.

How do i monitor my graphics card ram usage?

your card doesent use any it has its own(512)

How do i monitor my graphics card ram usage?

Vista taking 800mb of ram sounds reasonable. My system is running at 560mb right now with just Firefox open(no other startup items are running either).

PCI-Express graphics cards have built in RAM and would not be using your system RAM. On-Board video cards(the ones that come built into the motherboard) will use some of the system ram for video ram, you may want to verify that the on-board video is disabled in the bios if you have on-board video as well. In either case the amount of RAM taken up by the on-board video when not acitvely being used would be minimal(approx. 32mb).

How do i monitor my graphics card ram usage?

try to run direct x diagnostic you'll see if your ram is being used as shared memory of your video card there. Just find "dxdiag" in your system and run it.