This is because those integrated cards can elastically size the memory they
allocate from the system RAM. So by default it uses 8MiB, and I guess 256MiB is
the maximum it can size up to if needed. You can tune that from the BIOS
usually.
Long time ago the AGP bus appeared for such cards to try to speed up the access
bandwidth of the system RAM for such GPUs, but even with AGP they were slow as
turtle (compared to discrete VRAM GPUs).
BTW, if you want to see in the future by 5-10 years: the dGPUs (discrete GPUs)
will disappear, Intel and AMD are both moving towards APUs, where the CPU and
the GPU is on one die (those products are already on the market). NVidia also
has the Tegra, where the CPU is ARM compatible. Today those GPUs still have
discrete VRAM (most of the time), but some of the GPU already got smarted up
with memory management unit for the system RAM. So they can read/write the
system RAM by themselves, and see the system RAM from their virtual address
space (of course the GPU has to implement sniffing protocol to track the
validation of the cache, etc). I predict that soon the CPUs and GPUs in those
APU chips will just see one RAM. The long visioned AGP dream (which is a
nightmare for the high-en dGPU gamers) will come true.
There will be only one product line of dGPU which will be still alive: the
expensive NVidia Tesla-like GPGPU cards for HPC computations. Those servers are
tiny and can outperform huge servers in FLOPS.
Csaba
________________________________
From: nlug-talk@googlegroups.com [nlug-talk@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
Chris McQuistion [cmcquist...@watkins.edu]
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 3:42 PM
To: nlug-talk@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [nlug] Command of the Day (or whenever someone has just googled
for 20 minutes...)
I don't think that command " lspci -v -s 01:00.0 " is necessarily reliable at
telling you the actual video RAM for your card. I just ran it on one of my
Atom boxes that I know uses 8 MB of system RAM for the pitiful onboard video.
It reported the following:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated
Graphics Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 7418
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
Memory at fea80000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
I/O ports at dc00 [size=8]
Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at fea40000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
Capabilities: [90] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: intelfb, i915
One of those lines lists size=256M, but I know that this system is actually
using 8 MB of system RAM for video.
Chris
On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Howard White
<hwh...@vcch.com<mailto:hwh...@vcch.com>> wrote:
Okay, so I'm not leading edge here...
Wanted to know how much video memory my workstation system has. Have other
cards that could be swapped out should that be a good thing.
Step one - find video card address within lspci
my example listed as 01:00.0 VGA Compatible Controller...
Step two - lspci -v -s 01:00.0
I now know that this card has 256MB
Did a lspci on this laptop and no VGA adapter showed up. Oh well...
Howard
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