[Discuss] Conflicting Information Regarding Video Memory

[epp at mcom.com]

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 22:57:44 -0400
Shankar Viswanathan <shankar.viswan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/11/20 12:32 PM, epp at mcom.com wrote:
> > Thanks for the reply.
> >
> > It's an HP (Compaq) CQ5826, it only has two open x1 slots on the
> > motherboard. There are no memory settings in the BIOS.
> >
> > https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03054469
> >
> > A Radeon 5450 is what I bought for the other desktop (also an
> > HP/Compaq), which has x1, x16 and legacy PCI slots, despite
> > being two years /older/ than the CQ5826. That has an on-board NVIDIA
> > GPU which has caused issues with Linux, it would crash if I used
> > certain desktop environments. With the new Radeon card in that, it
> > now runs like a brand new machine.  
> 
> OEMs often restrict the number and width of PCIe ports to fit size
> and cost of the motherboards & chassis - although this is the first
> time I have heard of a motherboard not having at least a x8 slot (if
> not a x16). The RS780 chipset certainly supports more than 2 x1 lanes
> of PCIe 
> - I think it goes up to 20 or 22 lanes of PCIe Gen2 (if memory serves
> me right).
> 
> As Dan pointed out, typically there is a BIOS setting to adjust the 
> amount of memory allocated to the integrated graphics - this is
> called "UMA memory", "Shared Graphics Memory" or "Video Memory" in
> various BIOS vendor terminology. In some really old motherboards,
> there even was a jumper to choose between two different settings for
> this memory. Increasing this pool allows for higher resolutions
> (assuming rest of the system supports that), greater details to be
> rendered etc.
> 
> To go back to your original question: what do you use this machine
> for? How is the 256MB video memory limiting you?
> 
> -Shankar

Hi Shankar,

It's used as a regular computer: e-mail, web browsing, documents, etc.
No gaming or anything that would knowingly require a high amount of
video memory. 

I have been experiencing numerous crashes of an e-mail app, in which
the Fedora packager and the lead developer both determined X11 was
causing the crashes, based on the library forcing the app to either
abort or seg fault. And as previously mentioned on the list,
Chromium-based browsers crashed when trying to attend Zoom meetings -
which was resolved with the installation of Zoom's Linux package. I
felt the web browsers alone should have been able to handle it, since
Firefox had no issues accessing the same meetings. This was without the
use of a camera on this end.

All this made me question whether 256MB of RAM allocated for the video
was enough. The main BIOS screen displays the total amount of RAM
installed, there are no video memory settings on any of the screens.