I was running Jessie using a Nvidia 8600GT PCI board. I over-wrote that however with OpenBSD and as part of that removed the nvidia card so as to run with the on board Radeon ATI. Having played around with OpenBSD (and not liking its upgrade/security patching approach) I installed Stretch ... and now notice that htop shows around 250MB less memory than before (2GB has reduced down to 1.75GB).
I'm thinking that's possibly down to the onboard Radeon reserving/using some of the main memory for graphics such that I shouldn't be concerned. But I'm mindful that assumption could be wrong and that maybe I should be investigating further.
Is such a memory difference for different graphics cards/devices usual?
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250MB of memory disappeared
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dilberts_left_nut
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Re: 250MB of memory disappeared
Yes. If the onboard GPU is integrated in the chipset (IGP) or the processor (APU), when it is enabled a part of the system RAM is reserved as graphics memory and is not available as general purpose memory. Sometimes the BIOS/UEFI firmware setup allows to set the amount of memory allocated to the GPU.ruffwoof wrote:Is such a memory difference for different graphics cards/devices usual?
However if the onboard GPU is independant from the chipset and the processor (and is the same as those which can be found on add-in graphics cards), it usually has its own graphics memory. I have seen this setup with Matrox or ATI GPUs on a few rather old machines.