When a GPU's specification states on the box that it has '4GB' of vram, is that the max the card contains or is that in fact just the stock value the manufacturer set it at?? I just played Hitman and NBA 2K18 and the vram utilization was reading well above 4GB of ram. According to AMD's overlay feature, Hitman used 5 GB of vram and NBA 2K18 used 4.8GB of vram. This should be impossible if the manufacturer is claiming the card only has 4GB. Its either overclocking or there is something else going on here. Is it offloading the rest of the data to some other type of memory in the PC? If its the former case, then my RX 470 doesn't seem at all bothered by exceeding the stated amount since I haven't had any issues with either game so far. Hitman is a particularly special case because I specifically told the game not to override the memory safeguards as seen in the image below, yet its clearly doing it anyway. It doesn't really matter either way to me. I'm cool with it as long as the game runs well with no issues. I'm just wondering why this is happening.
There is additional resource space on the hard drive, Windows Task Manager breaks it down between dedicated and shared, but this isn't 1994 and you can't pop in additional RAM chips into your graphics card. You're also misusing the term "overclocking", which is when components are run at higher than stock speeds.