Hello all,
I pre-ordered a 13" Ryzen frame.work laptop and can’t wait to get my hands on it.
This week there was a discussion on r/AMDLaptops about how much RAM a Zen4 laptop can reserve for the iGPU. Most laptops limit RAM usage to 256MB or 512MB.
Does the frame.work laptop have a BIOS option to reserve 2GB or 4GB for the iGPU?
That would really increase the FPS when gaming.
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You may be misinterpreting something here, the igpu can dynamically allocate pretty much as much memory as the os lets it (windows apparently liets it use up to half of the available memory, no idea about linux), this bios setting is only what it gets permanently allocated.
If the igpu was actually limited to 512mb a lot of games would not run at all.
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I have tried dialing the fixed video memory up and down on HP laptops we use at work. 3d benchmarking after showed very little difference - in fact at whatever the max was (this being 2yrs ago) the laptops were getting a worse result.
RAM will be allocated automatically. The hitch is system memory is slower than dGPU memory.
I think one of the youtuber channels… might have been GamersNexus, ran an extreme benchmark putting as much memory as they could to an AMD iGPU, made quite a difference, but the CPU suffered badly as a result and benchmark results were poor outside of synthetic testing. IIRC. You can go look for that online.
I know there’s situations on the steam deck (running a zen 2 cpu with an rdna2 igpu) where increasing the reserved buffer for the igpu can dramatically reduce stuttering, but it is very situational, and can even see some performance regressions in some games like red dead redemption 2. I think it would be a nice feature to have to tweak, but in my experience, the automatic sharing of those resources works perfectly fine for most applications, especially if you have plenty of system memory in the first place (16 or more GB).
First user reviews of EliteBook 865 with 7840U (comment in German) confirm that in case of this laptop the VRAM is limited in BIOS to up to 512 MB – which is terrible, to say the least.
Hope that such limitation will not be the case for AMD-based Frameworks.
The very closely related Z1 Extreme APU used in the ROG Ally has 4 GB or 8 GB options of VRAM allocation, which sounds much more reasonable and should allow the GPU to unleash its full potential.
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This setting matters very little, the igpu can dynamically allocate up to half the system memory by default (can be increased to more with some hacks but that is basically never necessary).
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Thank you for your answer, that would be a very good news, taking into the account the RAM upgradeability of both Framework and Elitebook 865/845 G10. Given that the Framework is not available in my country and there is no indication that this will change anytime soon, I am considering the latter as the only comparable alternative.