How much vRAM does your HD3000 have? This has 512MB

It depends on how much ram you have installed. With 4 gig of ram it will show 384? I believe, and 512 if you upgraded to 8 gigs of ram.

Yes it does. The system sets a side a percentage of whatever amount of ram you have installed. If you add system ram it will set more a side as video memory. When I bought the 13 inch MBP, it only had 4 gigs of ram, and used 384 mb's for video. Once I upgraded to 8 gigs of ram, the system reserved 512 mb's of that for video. I don't know if it will go higher if you install more than 8 gigs though.

Ladybug said:

Yes it does. The system sets a side a percentage of whatever amount of ram you have installed. If you add system ram it will set more a side as video memory. When I bought the 13 inch MBP, it only had 4 gigs of ram, and used 384 mb's for video. Once I upgraded to 8 gigs of ram, the system reserved 512 mb's of that for video. I don't know if it will go higher if you install more than 8 gigs though.

Click to expand...

Does that mean 8GB of RAM would increase gaming performance?

yep, i hv 512 vram for the onboard and 256 for the 6490. on 8gb ram.

Ladybug said:

Yes it does. The system sets a side a percentage of whatever amount of ram you have installed. If you add system ram it will set more a side as video memory. When I bought the 13 inch MBP, it only had 4 gigs of ram, and used 384 mb's for video. Once I upgraded to 8 gigs of ram, the system reserved 512 mb's of that for video. I don't know if it will go higher if you install more than 8 gigs though.

Click to expand...

I have a 2006 MacBook. It has 2GB of RAM, but the vRAM is only 64MB.

Chipset Model: GMA 950
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 64 MB of Shared System Memory
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x27a2
Revision ID: 0x0003
Displays:

Click to expand...

Fugue said:

Does that mean 8GB of RAM would increase gaming performance?

Click to expand...

Gaming performance might improve, or it might just improve the quality of textures loaded during your games. Someone with more knowledge might be able to answer this better than I ever could.

anotherdave said:

I have a 2006 MacBook. It has 2GB of RAM, but the vRAM is only 64MB.

Click to expand...

I don't know anything about the 2006 Macbooks. I just know that the video memory increased on the 2011 MBP once I installed more ram.

Mobius 1 said:

wait does that mean on every 2011 MBP 15" [and possibly 13"] you put in 8GB you get more vRAM for HD3000??

Click to expand...

Yes

Mobius 1 said:

wait does that mean on every 2011 MBP 15" [and possibly 13"] you put in 8GB you get more vRAM for HD3000??

Click to expand...

No.

To be pedantic, the HD3000 has no "VRAM." It utilizes some system RAM instead of having dedicated RAM built in to it, or next to it.

The effect, however, is the same--upgrading to 8 GB RAM increases the amount of RAM available for the HD3000 to use.

Mbp 8,2

Hey Guys,

I am the proud owner of the Macbook Pro, and the screenshot etc
Thanks for the info, and Mobius 1 Thanks for posting my question
The 8Gb sounds pretty logical, but its strange Apple doesn't tell customers about this...
When I ordered my Macbook the 348MB didn't change into 512MB when I selected 8GB instead of 4 (double checked).

A buddy of mine has got the latest version iMac 27" which has a Sandy bridge chipset as well, I asked him to instal 8GB and 16GB of RAM, but nothing changed.. This might be because the iMac doesn't have 2 gpu's like my Mbp but it does have a i7 processor which should handle a part of the video performance...

In 1 or 2 months (when I'm sure there are no problems with my mpb) I'm going to open it up and take a look and maybe mod some things etc, so by that time I can try to put just 4GB of RAM in there, to see if it changes my vRAM

Sorry if my English lacks, I'm Dutch

makes me wonder, how much vram does it use when 16GB ram is available?

Mobius 1 said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTE0nex4AJg&lc

Guy says he have 512MB vRAM for HD 3000, read the comments, the guy he's ben replying to is me


Got his system profiler here

name and date blacked out for privacy

System spec. MBP 8,2 [thunderbolt], 15" glossy, 2.3GHz core i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB 5400, ssd [? brand ? cap]

Image


somebody with a 2.3Ghz post the same thing here...

Click to expand...

Actually, i have got a 500GB HDD @ 7200Rpm And a OCZ Vertex 2 SSD.

Mobius 1 said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTE0nex4AJg&lc

Guy says he have 512MB vRAM for HD 3000, read the comments, the guy he's ben replying to is me


Got his system profiler here

name and date blacked out for privacy

System spec. MBP 8,2 [thunderbolt], 15" glossy, 2.3GHz core i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB 5400, ssd [? brand ? cap]

Image


somebody with a 2.3Ghz post the same thing here...

Click to expand...

Mobius 1 said:

i thought you use the 6750M for gaming?

Click to expand...

I'v got a little tool installed called gfxCardStatus, it shows me which gpu i'm using and it lets me switch between them, but I use my mbp on my desk most of the time, so i don't care about power consumption and always use the AMD Radeon gpu
But normally it should automatically switch between them, when i start a game it starts using the Radeon gpu.
But for people that want to constantly use the power efficient gpu while doing some lightweight work the extra 166MB might be pretty cool

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3246

Intel HD Graphics 3000 allocates a base amount of 384 MB for video and processes at startup. For example, a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) with 4 GB of RAM installed has 3.7 GB of memory available to Mac OS X and applications (4096-384=3712). For portables that have been upgraded to 8 GB of RAM, the Intel HD Graphics 3000 will allocate 512 MB of system memory instead of 384 MB. For example, a MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011) with 8 GB of RAM has 7.6 GB of available memory (8192-512=7680)

Click to expand...

this is not the case for the nvidia 320m, is it? o.o

*fingers crossed*

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Archlord said:

this is not the case for the nvidia 320m, is it? o.o

*fingers crossed*

Click to expand...

I don't believe so.

Icy1007 said:

I don't believe so.

Click to expand...

:[ damn. i would love to have a 512mb 320m.

Steynvdv said:

Hey Guys,

I am the proud owner of the Macbook Pro, and the screenshot etc
Thanks for the info, and Mobius 1 Thanks for posting my question
The 8Gb sounds pretty logical, but its strange Apple doesn't tell customers about this...
When I ordered my Macbook the 348MB didn't change into 512MB when I selected 8GB instead of 4 (double checked).

A buddy of mine has got the latest version iMac 27" which has a Sandy bridge chipset as well, I asked him to instal 8GB and 16GB of RAM, but nothing changed.. This might be because the iMac doesn't have 2 gpu's like my Mbp but it does have a i7 processor which should handle a part of the video performance...

In 1 or 2 months (when I'm sure there are no problems with my mpb) I'm going to open it up and take a look and maybe mod some things etc, so by that time I can try to put just 4GB of RAM in there, to see if it changes my vRAM

Sorry if my English lacks, I'm Dutch

Click to expand...

It's just a feature that the sandy bridge integrated graphics have. The iMacs use separate AMD graphics with their own graphics memory, so changing the system RAM has no effect on the graphics memory.

The amount of shared video memory is normally dynamically allocated to your integrated graphics processor. It is the maximum that the graphics processor can use out all your available memory, but it doesn't mean it will. For example if I'm running just a few brower windows, it won't need much.