ATI graphics card w/ faulty video memory - use shared memory?

imrehg · 2008-05-21 09:44:23

Hi!

I have an Acer laptop, with an ATI Mobility Radeon card, with 64Mb dedicated video memory. It seems the machine is getting older, and the video memory developed faults, so the display is simply unreadable sometimes. Too bad that the computer is out of warranty for years now, and couldn't seem to find spare parts on the web.

When using it, in the console it looks very weird, that some letters are clear, as they are in a good part of the memory, while other letters are just exploded bunch of pixels and cannot be read.... X can be sometimes better, but still unusable for many things....

I was wondering, is there a way force my graphics card to use the system's memory in shared memory mode? For example forcing it to use a different driver? The slightly reduced system memory would so worth it, if I could have clear screen again....

Every help is appreciated, cheers!

Aaron · 2008-05-21 16:24:03

Are you familiar at all with the bios?

There should be a setting to force onboard/integrated video I believe.

imrehg · 2008-05-21 18:03:16

Sounds like a reasonable idea....

Unfortunately, not seems to be working just jet.
I hae Phoenix FirstBIOS Notebook Pro (ver 3A08), which lists that the card has 64Mb memory, but cannot do anything with it....

Also lists that the card has it's own BIOS, version ATI M11-008.018M.017.001 I found some bios editors, but not the bios files themselves on the web. And they still seem to be more focused on clockspeeds, than memory.....

Anybody know any tools or additional info along these lines?

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-21 09:44:23

ATI graphics card w/ faulty video memory - use shared memory?

#2 2008-05-21 16:24:03

Re: ATI graphics card w/ faulty video memory - use shared memory?

#3 2008-05-21 18:03:16

Re: ATI graphics card w/ faulty video memory - use shared memory?

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