I've got an AMD A10-6800K that is being converted from a HTPC to a spare PC for the wife. It's on an MSI A88XM-E45 (Bolton D4) board, with 16GB @1866. I've looked in the bios but can't find any option to increase the memory allocated to the iGPU. Opening up CCC, Information there says only 768MB is being used for graphics. I also checked it with a game running, hoping it was dynamic, but it stayed at 768 Wife likes to run Second Life and D3. Anyone know if/where it might be possible to increase the memory?
Still 768MB using GPUz. I've got a spare HD6450 with 2GB, but it runs worse than the A10 does - tried it in relative's machines. All this is just what was already here. Just need something to hold us over until next year & she wants a gaming quality laptop for schooling & the games mentioned above.
Found it. Had to enable Dual Graphics mode, then it let me allocate memory. Side note - I've got 24GB of memory handy, but only a Win7 Home license, so 16GB usable memory. Is the system smart enough to use the 2GB for the GPU, and still leave a full 16GB for Windows? (2x8Gb + 2x4GB)
I think so, but pop it in an find out. Though you're not going to see a difference between 14GB of system memory and 16GB either way. I would pop the 4GB sticks out and use them elsewhere.
Appeared like it did work, with 16GB usable, 2GB to the GPU and the rest in limbo. But my other machine only has 16GB in it, so I reinstalled Windows on both, putting the 8.1 license that was on it to the APU machine, and putting 7 on the other. 21.9GB usable now, out of 24GB and it's made a difference. Anywhere from 5-15Fps jump, and low->Medium settings quality jump in most games.
If the iGPU had 2GB allocated to it before and has 2GB allocated to it now, all at the same speed, FPS can't go up. The quantity of installed memory has no bearing on framerate at all.
I would probably attribute the FPS increase to the fresh install with most likely a newer driver. No game that I know of can use more than 8GB of RAM (BF4 recommends 8GB, but past a patched memory leak actually only uses 3-4GB), especially when you are running on low-medium. Having more RAM than the game can use will never give a FPS increase.