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waspy

Member

From: Sagittarius A*

Registered: 2010-12-07

Posts: 40

[SOLVED] lspci only detecting half my video RAM

So i needed to look up details about my video card when i noticed something strange. It seems the system is only allocating half of the available video memory for some reason. What's the reason for this? I haven't tweaked it or assigned any swap memory or anything like that for it either so i don't know what's up. I should have 512 MB, but i only have half. Here's my lspci output:

sudo lspci -v -s 01:00.0

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G94 [GeForce 9600 GT] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 827c
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
	Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	Memory at fa000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
	I/O ports at cc00 [size=128]
	[virtual] Expansion ROM at fe880000 [disabled] [size=512K]
	Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3
	Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
	Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
	Capabilities: [b4] Vendor Specific Information: Len=14 <?>
	Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel
	Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting <?>
	Capabilities: [600] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=024 <?>
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nvidia, nvidiafb, nouveau

Is there any way i can fix this? I mean i have no problems whatsoever and i can watch 1080p videos and using 1920x1080 resolution without any lag, even play most games on high settings without too much lag, but still, it would be nice to have all my video memory.

edit:
Didn't see that thread in the search, but thanks! interesting to know. And if anyone happens to stumble upon this thread, basically the "problem" is:

(quoted from this thread )
On most GPUs, it's sized 256MB to avoid various SBIOS compatibility and resource contention/exhaustion problems. Please note that the size of BAR1 does not impact how much video memory the GPU can access. It does limit how much video memory can be accessed directly by the CPU, but due to the large size discrepancies between BAR1 (typically 256MB, as I said above) and video memory (1+GB on high-end GPUs), the NVIDIA Linux graphics driver does not rely heavily on CPU mappings of surfaces in video memory.

Last edited by waspy (2011-11-12 21:24:35)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] lspci only detecting half my video RAM

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=107223