FW16 iGPU questions

Framework Laptop 16
1

Hello all :slight_smile: I had a few questions relating to the ryzen 7840HS and its Radeon 780M.

  1. I have 32gB of RAM, in the BIOS I turned on the option to have 4gB of VRAM. I have seen videos on people using this CPU and they had managed to turn the VRAM to 8gB. Is this possible on the FW16 or would this be detrimental to the parts?

  2. I am a dummy when it comes to computers so I am not sure if this is even possible or if you need two graphics cards to make it happen, but are you able to pass through the iGPU to a VM?

Many thanks

2

  1. This wouldn’t hurt anything to set 8gb, you would just have less system memory available. I do not know if the bios in the framework laptop can go to 8gb or not.

  2. Yes, it would act the same as a dedicated GPU. How it is done depends on what hypervisor you are running.

3

It’s not detrimental, but the BIOS does not support setting 8GB exclusively to the iGPU (only up to 4GB). Afaik though, the memory is technically already automatically shared between the CPU and iGPU through dynamic allocation if more is needed.

4

The amount set in the BIOS is the amount of ram that is dedicated exclusively to the iGPU (4 GB in your case). Half of the remaining ram (14 GB) is dedicated exclusively to the CPU, and the rest (14 GB) can be dynamically allocated as needed.

In other words your iGPU currently has access to 18 GB of ram. Unfortunately some software doesn’t work properly with the dynamically allocated VRAM and will refuse to use more than the dedicated 4 GB, however most will happily use all 18 GB available to the iGPU.

If you are on Linux the upcoming 6.10 kernel update brings tweaks that make this more transparent to software and improves compatibility. I’ve been using the pre-release 6.10-rc3 and can confirm that the few programs (mainly AI tools) that previously couldn’t use the dynamically allocated 14 GB are now able to without issue.

Framework does not have any official option to increase the dedicated VRAM amount above 4 GB. I believe the 3rd party tool Smokeless_UMAF can do that, however messing with Smokeless_UMAF can potentially cause unexpected issues so I recommend not doing it unless you really need to increase the dedicated VRAM.

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