A year ago, I bought a laptop with an AMD CPU and a dedicated AMD graphics card, mostly for good linux drivers. Now, this did hold up, but I discovered that the full 16 GB of RAM on there were not available, likely due to memory partitioning. That’s more painful when you consider that the dedicated graphics card has 8 gigs of VRAM to itself.
It’s only 2 gigs that are lopped off, but it sometimes makes a difference, so I am hoping you could help me, as I have both never partitioned RAM before and am still contemplating what to actually do about the problem.
Do you think I should:
Keep it as is?
Somehow stop using the internal GPU altogether?
Find a way so that the internal GPU can use the dedicated’s VRAM?
As for your ‘problem’, it’s not partitioning, it’s memory allocation. It’s not the same but explaining the why and how is beyond the scope of this reply
Anyway, you can try allocating a smaller amount of RAM to the iGPU in the BIOS. So you don’t need to ‘partition’ memory after all
Are you talking about an igpu utilizing shared system memory?
In the past there were generally ways to set it manually in bios/uefi settings.
Currently it seems to be something adjusted automatically. No idea if there’s a way to cap it. You could potentially set the system to discrete gpu only if that’s an option and desirable.
I’d say that it’d be useful to tell what your laptop model, specs, and OS are, but I can’t personally offer help beyond what I have here.
I think the issue you will find is that if you do not allocate memory to your iGPU, you will always run with the dGPU, increasing your power usage, potentially making your battery life shorter.
You could also decrease the iGPU RAM but might run into issues with non-graphics accelerated task.
I have a laptop with a 680m. I have 32GiB of onboard RAM on my system. Since it is an RDNA2 iGPU that can actually do some gaming ang heavy lifting, I have 8GiB reserved for the iGPU. If you have a system with 16GiB you may want to allocate 2 to 4 GiB to the iGPU and the system will always pull more if it absolutely needs it.
Most systems allow you to set the minimum reservation in the uEFI. If yours does not, then maybe you need to use Ryzen Master or something like that to make the tweaks if the Adrenaline drive does not allow you to set it.
