AMD's New Variable Graphics Memory Lets Laptop Users Reassign Their RAM To Gaming (theverge.com) 14
AMD has introduced Variable Graphics Memory (VGM) for its AI 300 "Strix Point" laptops, allowing users to convert up to 75% of their system memory into dedicated VRAM via the AMD Adrenalin app, enhancing gaming performance for titles requiring more VRAM. The Verge reports: You might be wondering: does that extra video memory actually make a difference? Well, it depends on the game. Some games, like Alan Wake II, require as many as 6GB of VRAM and will throw errors at launch if you're short -- Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, and Lenovo Legion Go buyers have been tweaking their VRAM settings for some time to take games to the threshold of playability. But in early testing with the Asus Zenbook S 16, a Strix Point laptop that's already shipped with this feature, my colleague Joanna Nelius saw that turning it on isn't a silver bullet for every game. With 8GB of VRAM, the laptop played Control notably faster (65fps vs. 54fps), but some titles had smaller boosts, no boost, or even slight frame rate decreases.
This is new? (Score:2)
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As far as I'm aware, partitioning of RAM was done at the system level via BIOS and was static, requiring a reboot to change. This appears to be a dynamic allocation that can be done on demand.
=Smidge=
vampire video to the extreme! (Score:2)
vampire video to the extreme!
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I thought ever since the AGP days of video cards it's been possible to use a portion of system memory as video memory?
Yes but this has always been fixed in the BIOS and always been laughably small. By default on most iGPU implementations this is between 128MB and 512MB and needs to be set in BIOS.
From what I understand looking around online it seems that AMD's drivers have historically handled this in the background variably, without any fixed setting and that as a result some games shat the bed when they queried how much vRAM was actually available to them. It seems the news here is that setting this option will results i
We are back to shared RAM again? (Score:2)
I remember some internal video cards using shared RAM on PCs in the early 2000s. Definitely not barn-burner performance. I can see having dedicated VRAM, but "swapping" to normal RAM seems new... or having all RAM on the machine be dual-ported so it can act as VRAM if needed, although this makes subsequent RAM upgrades more difficult to the relative rarity of dual-ported memory modules.
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Shared RAM is still a norm on overwhelming majority of PCs that do not have a dedicated graphics card but instead GPU sits on the CPU and shares system memory with CPU.
This is about dynamic allocation of said memory, rather than the current mechanism where you allocate memory in BIOS and it sticks until you reboot into BIOS and set a new memory value.
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I can see having dedicated VRAM, but "swapping" to normal RAM seems new... or having all RAM on the machine be dual-ported so it can act as VRAM if needed, although this makes subsequent RAM upgrades more difficult to the relative rarity of dual-ported memory modules.
Forget doing RAM upgrades. This has "32GB LPDDR5X on board".
For AI models? (Score:2)
I kinda wish I could do this for the nVidia card in my home AI workload machine when performance is negotiable and a model wants 24GB but AMD still doesn't support a CUDA - compatible api so, OK, I guess?
Learn from Compaq maybe.
Somewhat jokingly (Score:2)
This sounds like going back to editing your config.sys and autoexec.bat files to load himem.sys to free up memory.
More interestingly for me (Score:2)
As someone who's completely uninterested in modern gaming, I would be interested in reclaiming video RAM for general computing.
Mac 128K did this in 1984 (Score:1)
The Disk Copy [earlymacintosh.org] utility allowed copying a 400KB floppy in 4 passes on a computer with only 128KB of RAM.
Under normal operation, 22KB of the 128KB was reserved for video. Disk Copy borrowed most of that memory so a floppy could be duplicated in only 4 passes.
Took way too long. (Score:2)
When AMD accquired ATi I wondered What's taking so long?
When intel started developing their own iGPUs (instead of licensing PowerVR designs), I wondered what's taking so long?
When Windows Vista arrived with a new display driver model, and more goodies under the hood, I wondered Is this the day? Alas, the answer was nope.
When Apple did it in their Mx Desktops, I said, sure this will lit a fire under the X86-64 crowd's ass, but, again, nope....
It is finally here. It took them tooooo long, but is a welcome dev
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