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hiciu

Member

Registered: 2010-08-11

Posts: 89

noone told me I can sacrifice ram for gaming performance on amd igpu

Hello everyone,

I have experienced a large, unexpected speedup in a few games on integrated AMD GPU. While it is fun to be able to play on "ultra" instead of "medium" for once, I am left with questions: why did I have to change it, shouldn't it work on auto? Is this common knowledge? What else am I missing?

It required manually setting the "UMA Frame buffer Size" option in UEFI settings that is hidden deep somewhere under cryptic entries. I had to get my motherboard's bios settings manual to find it. It is described as:

> Configure the size of memory that is allocated to the integrated graphics processor when the system boots up.

On my hardware - ryzen 7 8700g with integrated amd gpu, with 2x16GB of RAM - the default setting meant 512MB of memory from system ram was reserved for gpu. And it worked fine; it was much faster than what I would expect from an integrated gpu anyway.

I was tinkering with something else, launched radeontop and noticed that it said I had only 512MB of VRAM and some more GTT memory. Modern games require GPUs with 4GB of memory or more, so I was wondering how does it work, if it uses that GTT memory and so on...

Anyway: I changed that "uma framebuffer size" option to 16GB. I did not expect such large difference in overall performance in games.

There is always price to pay of course. I have only 16GB available for system now.

Is this common knowledge and I'm just late to the party?

Last edited by hiciu (2024-10-11 17:45:39)

ugjka

Member

From: Latvia

Registered: 2014-04-01

Posts: 1,955

Website

Re: noone told me I can sacrifice ram for gaming performance on amd igpu

check whether you can enable DOCP setting for your ram, should increase framerate in games

Last edited by ugjka (2024-10-11 19:35:39)

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https://ugjka.net

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,104

Re: noone told me I can sacrifice ram for gaming performance on amd igpu

well - although I don't have hardware THAT new and hence am kinda impressed you can set shared igpu vram to a whopping 16gb now (the last system I used with an igpu had a hard limit of 4gb no matter the size of installed ram) - to get right to the question:

yes - it IS common knowledge that more (and to take in ugjka advice about XMP: faster) vram increases gaming performance - as games take as much and as fast of resources the system has to offer
also: yes - it IS common knowledge you can set the amount of shared vram within the bios - this goes back even to pre-uefi days before ~2010-ish - although back then the numbers were quite a bit smaller
also also: igpus made a huge leap since release of amd ryzen / zen-architecture and modern radeon gcn and rdna architectures - so, yes, with a good cpu thier igpus are quite capable for mid-range gaming - that's one of the reasons why low-end and mid-range budget dedicated gpus started to phase out: because the igpus these days (the radeon in amd more than the new xe stuff intel comes with) got good enough to replace that market sectore entirely
also also also: why was the default so low: because even with igpus so powerfull today most gamers still use a dedicated gpu - and often use cpus without igpus - so defaults for igpus are just set to somewhat low - it's not meant to get actively used but rather "you got an igpu - here, have some spare ram so it works at all"

why noone told you? well, as said: because it's common knowledge - and in these days and age with everyone carry powerful handhelds in our pockets (modern phones are also several times more powerfull than computers were about two decades ago) with access to the internet all the time everywhere and with billion dollar companies behind search engines with AI-assisted searches: just open google and put a question in like "why does the igpu of my 8700g suxx so much?" and you will find several pages of people discussing and explaining exactly what you figured out on your own - so ... why anyone SHOULD tell you? instead the hardware industry has an interest in you don't know that but rather buy an expensive dedicated gpu for a couple hundred bucks - it's all about capitalism