Stop sharing video memory?

On a certain laptop I own, I have an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150. It has 128MB of dedicated video ram, and shares 191MB.

The laptop has 1GB of RAM, so it gets reduced to about 89*MB.

I was wondering if there was anyway to configure the card (which is PCI-Express) so that it only uses its own dedicated ram, so that I don't have to share. 128MB of video ram seems enough for what I would be using this perticular machine for. I need the full 1GB of RAM, though.

So...anyone? Is it possible or should I just keep dreaming?

#474173

Bad news, a Radeon Express 1150 doesn't have any of its own memory, it is using system memory. The Radeon Express is a video graphics sub-system in the motherboards northbridge chip. So you can't get that memory back unless you go into the bios and set it to a lower amount, say 64MB. Sorry to bust your bubble but you didn't get a notebook with dedicated video memory, you got one with shared memory. So you have to live with the memory loss.

#474183

Im confused...:S

#474184

Its very simple, the bios has carved out 128mb of RAM as a permanent frame buffer. Then the system is also able to cache an additional 191mb of memory for loading textures on demand. So if you load an older game, say the original QuakeGL, the 128mb is all the system will need to do all the rendering. But if you load a newer game that uses larger textures, say FarCry, then the main buffer can fill very quickly, so the the system is able to access an additional 191mb of RAM to do the job. Thus you get a total of 319mb.

Many video cards that have dedicated memory also can do this. Here is what mine looks like in Vista.

You can see that my card has 256mb of its own dedicated memory, but it can use 495mb of my system Ram to cache textures in addition to the built in memory on the card. This give my system a total of 751mb total of usable memory.

I hope this answers your question and helps clear any confusion.

#474201

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Radeon-Xp...150.2173.0.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperMemory

#474221

Thanks for clearing that up for me . I was just curious as this is the only computer in my house with this perticular setup; not to mention the only ATI card as well. All my other PCs have nVidia.

Slightly off topic question: Why is it that ATI cards tend to come with AMD processors; and vice versa with nVidia/Intel?

All Intel machines I own are nVidia, and all AMD machines I own (currently only 2) have ATI cards/chipset

#474258

ATI and AMD are the same company.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/

#474270

oh shiznit, so I guess it might a little biased then! :-P

Wow, thats interesting. Thanks for that, rjohnstone! I'm surprised I didn't know that already...

#474274

Well there are allot of notebooks that have nvidia chipsets as well. ATI is getting a little stronger in this market know. As for nvidia be more prevalent on intel, not true. Nivida is used more on the AMD side, and still is for the most part. Almost all AMD based motherboards use Nvidia parts, then VIA, then ATI. AMD is changing this with buyout of ATI, but things are still in Nvidias hands right now.Most intel based computers either notebook or desktop come with intel discrete graphics built into the northbridge, known as intel extreme. The nvidia option on the machines you have is not the norm, trust me on this. I work as a computer repair tech and the bigest percentages of intel machines use intel graphics. But again this is a choice of the system designer/builder. And things are always changing.

#474277

I've noticed the VIA and ATI parts in both the southbridge and northbridge of this machine, as well.

#474278