Video Memory

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

Ray Parrish wrote:
>
> Yes! I did find that interesting reading. The Nvidia page specified the 
> 6200 series cards where mine is a 6100 series, but I suppose the same 
> could apply to them as well. I tried to use the search on that page to 
> discover any more articles of that nature, and it couldn't even find the 
> article I was reading. How in the world did you find it?
>
> I ran the two pmap commands, and the second one returned the highest 
> amount, which when divided by 1024 to get MB's revealed a total of 63.5 
> MB's in use. The other returned 61 MB's.
>
> I was just in Windows, and it's System Information program reported 128 
> MB's of video RAM. When I rebooted I decided to try an experiment, and 
> went into the BIOS, and changed the video RAM setting to 64 MB's. After 
> logging into Ubuntu, I find it still claims 256 MB's via SysInfo, and 
> the Nvidia X Server Settings GUI application.
>
> Likewise the "nvidia-settings --query all" command returns a value of 
> 256 MB's.
>
> Having changed the video RAM setting in the BIOS seems to have had no 
> effect on the performance of Ubuntu. I do not that free now reports a 
> total of 438 MB's of system RAM, which differs from it's previous 
> reports of 384 MB's with the previous BIOS setting of 128 MB's for the 
> video RAM.
>
> I have yet to read the pmap man page, and ran those commands without 
> looking them up first. I trusted you that time, NoOp, but don't count on 
> it in the future. 8-) I usually look up commands I find here first to 
> make sure they're OK.
>
> So... I guess it's possible that Ubuntu is allowing me to access VRAM 
> that exists on the onboard card that Windows apparently doesn't know 
> about. Very odd.
>
> Thanks for the help!
>
> Later, Ray Parrish
>   

Ray,

Providing your board is a FIC K8MC51G

    http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboards_d/FIC/K8MC51G/

it has an onboard video based on the

Chipset Nvidia Geforce 6100 nForce 410 (and not any video board Nv 6100)

    
http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/chipsets_d/Nvidia/Geforce+6100+nForce+410/

and no resident memory at all, depending on RAM for every bit of dynamic 
memory needed.

It was your first impression and I now also believe the video chipset is 
using only the BIOS allocated frame buffer, any other conflicting 
information being misunderstood or incorrect. At least it is what I see 
in my own onboard NVidia 8200 (up to 256 Mb). As to why all these 
different numbers, I remain clueless.

-- 
Lucio M. Nicolosi, Eng. - São Paulo - Brazil
skype: lmnicolosi1
Lat.:  23°34'4.79"S - Long.: 46°39'59.53"W
Linux Regist. User #481505 - http://counter.li.org/