On Sat, 20 Aug 2011, Dave Anderson wrote:
Thanks to all who've replied. It seems kind of disgusting that a modern video card can grab 1/4 of the available physical address space on i386, but I suppose that pretty much everyone with such a card is running amd64 instead.
If you want to feel disgusted even more: some popular and frequently used chipsets for amd64 CPU's, such as Intel 82945GM, address memory with 32 bits only. With such a chipset you suffer similar limitation with amd64 as you would with i386 (available RAM minus devices' address space minus shared video memory etc.). But these chipsets are not produced anymore, I hope.
Regards, David