gnasher729 said:With integrated graphics, it doesn't work like that. There is only one kind of memory, and that is your computer's RAM. Both graphics card and CPU access it when they need to. The only difference between "64MB" and "224MB" integrated graphics memory is that either 64MB or 224MB have been set aside so that the graphics driver can decide what to do with that memory, and the operating system doesn't touch it. If the 64 MB is not enough, then the graphics card can access data outside that region just as fast as data within the 64 MB, because it is all the same kind of memory anyway. So setting aside 224 MB will not have much affect at all, except that your Mac will run slower because it has less memory available to all the applications.
savar said:I've been wondering about this. Thanks for posting. Where did you get this information from? Have you read the following article?
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14
My interpretation is that backing stores are *not* drawn directly from RAM, but must be copied into VRAM first. So I wonder if setting the integrated graphics VRAM low means that you're copying from one part of RAM to another before displaying. I hope its not the case but it well could be. Furthermore, I assume that the GPU can read memory directly without processor intervention, so having a larger VRAM (even if it is virtual) would save CPU bandwidth.
Of course Apple could have optimized this so that the VRAM setting doesn't really matter...but from the above article it sounds like when they wrote Tiger they were never anticipating integrated graphics, so who knows what actually got delivered.
lewion said:I think we found ourselves a reason why here... Mac mini vs imac 64 vs 128
macbook vs macbook pro 64 vs 128-256 that just seems to be it... if people who don't know a thing, see that mini has 224 and imac 128.. they go for the mini... if people see macbook has 224 and pro has 128, they go for macbook... it's just marketing....
JackSYi said:Maybe Leopard will fully utilize the GMA 950s power.
Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available.