Video memory is a term generally used in computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

s to describe some form of writable memory, usually RAM, dedicated to the purpose of holding the information necessary for a graphics card to drive a display device

Display device

A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form...

. In modern 3D graphics cards, the video memory may also hold 3D vector data, textures, backbuffers

Framebuffer

A framebuffer is a video output device that drives a video display from a memory buffer containing a complete frame of data.The information in the memory buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel on the screen...

, overlays and GPU

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

 programs, and sometimes takes the form of a Shared Memory Architecture

Shared Memory Architecture

In computer architecture, Shared Memory Architecture refers to a design where the graphics chip does not have its own dedicated memory, and instead shares the main system RAM with the CPU and other components....

 (SMA).

See also

• GDDR3
  GDDR3
  Graphics Double Data Rate 3 is a graphics card-specific memory technology, designed by ATI Technologies with the collaboration of JEDEC.It has much the same technological base as DDR2, but the power and heat dispersal requirements have been reduced somewhat, allowing for higher performance memory...
  
  
• GDDR4
  GDDR4
  GDDR4 SDRAM is a type of graphics card memory specified by the JEDEC Semiconductor Memory Standard. It is a rival medium to Rambus's XDR DRAM...
  
  
• GDDR5
  GDDR5
  GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...
  
  
• Dedicated / Shared memory
• VRAM
  VRAM
  Video RAM, or VRAM, is a dual-ported variant of dynamic RAM , which was once commonly used to store the framebuffer in some graphics adapters....
  
  
• Screen buffer
  Screen buffer
  In computing, screen buffer is a part of computer memory used by a computer application for the representation of the content to be shown on the computer display....