limited video memory

Hi!

My system has a 128MB Radeon 9250. Booting from the install cd it shows the full memory on workbench titlebar.
On my recently installed system seems to only handles 64MB of video RAM, however Ranger 1.45 tells me that the card has 128MB.

Of course nothing which needs more video ram runs correctly.
What can I do?

OS4.1 update 2
Pegasos 2

I remember that there was some posts in this subject before, but can't find it.

@lazi

try to disable all the effects on the gui prefs.. disable the 3D and select a 16bit mode and tell us how much video ram do you see..

@nubechecorre

There is 56MB free gfx mem if compositing is disabled in gui prefs. So it is 64 MB total.

@lazi

What exactly tells you how much video memory you have free?
Do you have it still displayed in the WB titlebar?
If yes, what exactly is the line that displays it?

Because there are different values you can tell Workbench to display
i.e. %mgum tells you the USED memory, %mgm tells you the video memory that is atm FREE (both in MB)

Maybe you just have the wrong setting?

Ranger tells you exactly in the line BELOW the max memory (134201344 bytes for me --- Radeon 9200 with 128 MB) how much memory is free.
If this value doesn't goe beyond 64 MB than i presume the memory on the card is faulty, because i have everthing set to on (3D, Compositing, a really big wallpaper etc.) and my free video memory stays around 75 MB.

The only thing i remember from OS4 is, that is it (yet) not possible to use 256 MB on a graphics card and that it will always be downgraded through the OS to 128 MB

Quote:

So this is some kind of OS4 limitation? I just got a Radeon 9250 with 256MB RAM for my Pegasos II running AmigaOS 4.1u2, but Ranger reports only 128MB. I was wondering if something was misconfigured...

Previously I had a 9200 with 128MB RAM and the OS recognized all the memory.

@lazi

Did you install the OS with that card? or is this a new card you switched after install? I ask this because when I changed mine I had to change the monitor's tooltypes in Devs:monitors ... and it didn't work well until I changed the name of the card on the tooltypes...

Regards
Efr?n

@Raziel

thats false, i have a 9250 with 256 Mb and it runs with 256 MB.
In a Peg2 :)
Here a Screenshot, not from me but its the Same....

http://www.a1k.org/forum/attachment.p ... mentid=27856&d=1278447962

@netrot

The currently-released Radeon drivers can not handle 256 MB because it is usually broken up into two disjoint 128 MB banks.

It is for this reason only that OS4.0 and OS4.1 limited graphics memory to 128 MB.

@Raziel

Quote:

Actually it works here on AmigaOne. I have a Radeon 9250 with 256MB Video Ram and it seems like since OS4.1 it can a access the whole memory.

@tonyw
My recollection is that OS4 can use the whole 256MB on a *few* 256MB cards, but unless you are lucky it will only use 128MB. This is because most cards split the 256MB into two parts, which OS4 can't handle yet.

@ChrisH

OK, so I misunderstood, then. I must have missed that change, I thought they were all limited to 128 MB still.

My apologies to 'netrot'.

@ChrisH

The Titlebar on my A1 currently shows 178MB FreeGFXRAM so I guess I have one of the few 9250's that can use the entire 256.

@Valiant

Anyone knows if this has/will be fixed for the new hd cards? As many of tehm have atleast 256mb ram,some 512 and even 1gig of ram on it. Would be a waste to only have 128mb available.

@tonyw

no Problem :)

I have this Card, it runs Perfect with 256 Mb.
but only on AmigaOS4.1, Morphos shows only 128 MB!

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?V ... &ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

At last the problem is solved :)

It was a desktop theme from OS4depot which used insanely large (1280x1022) images for window titlebars. After I cropped the images more than 50MB of video ram is freed.

Maybe Workbench shouldn't allocate and store image parts that hangs out the viewable area.

The concerned theme is: DeathCon desktop theme

As far as I understood, some cards have half their memory physically on-board and the rest is supposed to be shared with main memory.

I have a Radoe9250 with "256MB" RAM but only 128MB is used by OS4. My theory is that it has only 128MB physically on-board but the capability to be setup to use 128MB of system RAM to make up of the latter half. OS4 has no such "shared gfx memory" model.

Perhaps it is the same with your "128MB" card. Maybe it only has 64MB on-board and the rest is supposed to be shared with the system RAM if the driver supports that?

@Deniil

I don't think that there are such hybrid memory cards as you wrote it. However mine has on-board 128 MB, and as you see my previous post I found where it losts a significant amount of memory by a unproperly created desktop theme.

@all

So.. for the "my card has 256MB but OS4 only sees 128MB" problem we have:

1. The card indeed has 256MB but the OS can?t see it because it is partitioned

2. The card has only 128MB and the extra 128MB are supposed to be "stolen" from the main system RAM.

For the first one I suppose we can assume it will be eventually solved (since it is a software issue, right?), but the second one... that would be just a case of bad luck buying a particular card?

How could one identify such "cheating" cards?

Regards
Efren

@Bender

You are probably right, there may be both types.

1. Let's hope someone figures it out eventually.

2. I guess you have to look at the chips and see how many bits each chip can store and how many chips you have. guess it can be something like 65536k x 32 per chip with 4 chips giving 128MB. Haven't looked at memory chips markings myself since they were around a Mbit each.

@Deniil
There are some REALLY CHEAP graphics cards, which do what you describe, however they are a relatively new invention (as far as I know), and I don't think any of our supported graphics cards use such methods.