>>861209>You can choose to allocate how much ram it uses as video memory in BIOS btwReally? That sounds pretty prehistoric. On Intel it's all managed by the graphics driver, the rationale being:
- the GPU and CPU literally share the page of memory, i.e. the same physical chips service the page whether the CPU or the onboard try to read or write it
- the game is going to allocate the memory anyway, because the game wants to display the texture, so it doesn't matter whether the memory is "allocated to the CPU" or "allocated to the onboard" because (as per above) it's all the same memory anyway. If the driver told the game there wasn't enough memory to allocate it, the game would just keep it in RAM and "copy it to the GPU" on-demand. Which would use the same amount of memory as just telling the game it could allocate it
- not having a fixed size lets the memory allocation shrink below what would be considered a sensible amount when it's not doing anything, because it can just grow again.
Because of this, on the Intel onboard, "hardware reserved" is like 120MB, and the rest is "shared memory" that gets treated like if a program had used it.
