Shared video memory questions

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Destonomos

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 13, 2004
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My girlfriend has a Sony VAIO VGN-FS920 line of laptop and I was wondering why it was running so sluggish. She said it was fine but being the technofile I am I couldn't stand the lag I was seeing that she was oblivious to in the first place. She had a million programs running and using XP. I got her to cut down on having 50 programs open at once and it was still there so I got to rooting around and came to find out she has 512 ram in her laptop WITH SHARED VIDEO MEMORY :(. I told her she would see a performance upgrade if she just upped the amount of ram in her laptop and obviously she would. We went to the egg and found some ram from crucial for 40 bucks no less for 2 gigs :). She went ahead and ordered it but I had this one other question.

Another limiting factor on her laptop is the fact that her memory is shared to her video card on her laptop. Well right now its only sharing 30ish megs of ram to the intel onboard chipset. What I want to know is since she is going to have 2 gigs now is there a way to up the amount of shared memory to her onboard graphics card or not? If there is then how would you go about doing it. I'm trying to squeeze some performance out of her laptop so she can enjoy it a lot more :).
 
Should be a BIOS setting for that. But it's doubtful that increasing it will make much difference - 64mb should be more than enough, since it will almost certainly lack the horsepower to run anything needing more than that.
 
Anyone else what?

1. There is a BIOS setting that controls the amount of system memory dedicated to the onboard video.

2. Increasing it beyond 32MB will probably have little or no benefit.
 
XP runs fine on 512mb, but making that jump from 512 to 1GB+ is huge. You're going to notice more of a performance boost doing that than adding more memory to the video card.

Nice upgrade, and a good price.

You can check your BIOS for the video card memory settings and answer your own question there.
 
Yeah, I upgraded my GF's laptop from 256 to 2GB, and it's got a whole new life to it.

Shared memory amount doesn't matter, so long as you're not playing games. And the video driver will most likely assign video memory dynamically as it is needed if you do play a game.

Thus, do not be surprised at how little memory your video card needs just to display a desktop; I mean, we used to get by on cards with a megabyte of memory or less, so 32MB is plenty for any resolution you could display.
 
That laptop uses the Intel 915GM chipset. The shared memory uses something called DVMT, which allocates shared memory dynamically up to 128MB. You do not need to manually adjust it and there won't be an option in the CMOS setup.

You can see how much is currently allocated using the Intel graphics control panel applet. On the XP desktop, it will only use a few MB. If you're playing a game, it will allocate as much as it needs given the amount of memory installed.

If you want to read about it in more detail, see here: http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/applnots/302623.htm
 
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