amd radeon r7 graphics card

[Michael_722]

I have an hp pavilion 15-cd040wm laptop that has 12gb of ram and a radeon r7 graphics card. I'm wondering why I only have have 512mb of vram, shouldn't I be able to have more?

 

[marko55]

Boot in to the BIOS and see if you can change it. Some machines allow you to manually allocate more in the BIOS

 

[Michael_722]

Boot in to the BIOS and see if you can change it. Some machines allow you to manually allocate more in the BIOS

I've gone to the BIOS and I didn't see a way to change it there.

 

[marko55]

That's that then unfortunately.

 

[k1114]

It has more shared on top of that amount. Where are you seeing this amount? In any case, it's irrelevant to performance since it has no dedicated vram and it's just ram. It's quite weak so you should see usage maxed before vram is an issue.

 

[Michael_722]

It has more shared on top of that amount. Where are you seeing this amount? In any case, it's irrelevant to performance since it has no dedicated vram and it's just ram. It's quite weak so you should see usage maxed before vram is an issue.

I don't quite understand what that means because don't know very much about this stuff. and I saw on the graphics settings that the memory is 512mb.

 

[k1114]

Right click desktop, click display settings, then click display adapter properties. What does it say there?

 

[Bo Lee]

The only place where I can find that particular model listed is with Walmart. HP doesn't even list it on their site. Walmart will contract out cheap equipment to be sold by companies that are exclusive to them and are generally on the cheap. Normally I would say there has to be a way to adjust the video memory, but knowing that often the electronics sold by Walmart are really cheap, it absolutely would not surprise me in the least if it was not adjustable. The only reference to it I can find doesn't even mention the video memory, only that it is a R7 GPU. It is unusual for them to not mention the memory. Tells me that they are not wanting you to see how weak it is and that is just isn't adjustable. Other laptops, even from Walmart, will say "up to #### GB" for the video memory. With that model, it doesn't say anything. So unfortunately, I fear that it might not be adjustable.

 

[k1114]

There is a common misconception that the setting to change it does anything. Total shared is what it has at its disposal and this is set automatically by windows+igpu driver. No matter what you set it to, windows will share up to the max (with enough ram). It makes no difference to performance as it's system ram either way. You're just limiting it to not be used as system ram. Regardless of the model, all apus vram functions the same with hsa/huma. And all bristol ridge igpus are not far off in performance to each other.

I asked what it says under display properties just to confirm it should be 4gb total. It's probably set to 512mb pre allocated (shown as dedicated) which seems to be the norm. Games/software will say that amount but you will see usage go above as it is dynamically shared.

 

[Michael_722]

Right click desktop, click display settings, then click display adapter properties. What does it say there?

I went to display adapter properties and it says that the total available graphics memory is 6381 MB, the dedicated video memory is 512 MB, system video memory is 0 MB, and shared system memory is 5869 MB

 

[k1114]

Then it can use up to 6gb. That's more than it'll ever need.

 

[Michael_722]

So if it can use up to 6 GB do you know if there is any way to increase the dedicated memory without using bios. I am attempting to play GTA 5 and it is having trouble running at the lowest setting because of the 512 MB. And I didn't mean to vote down on your solution.

 

[k1114]

If you could have an infinite amount of vram, it would still have the same bad performance. As mentioned earlier, you have 6gb which is plenty and the issue is the igpu is just way too weak.