Brace yourself for a new Apple Display (fingers crossed)
This is what I am thinking; paired with the new Mac mini perhaps?
Brace yourself for a new Apple Display (fingers crossed)
The rest of your VRAM is actually used to do offscreen rendering of new windows, and in case of games, storing textures. More textures in VRAM means less time spent swapping textures around when you move through the game and thus some performance benefits.
Will this anyhow improve performance in games? How?
The VRAM on the 2012 mini already went up to 1024MB when Mavericks (10.9) came out. It certainly did with mine and many others on the forum, although that might have been because I run 16GB RAM. Although a member in this post reports it going up with Mavericks 10.9 on just 4GB RAM.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1658108/
In relation to mini owners, you might all just be noticing only now what already happened with Mavericks 10.9 months ago. That is, you had 1024MB all along.![]()
So you lose 512MB of physical ram used by system/apps to vram?
Don't know that I like this, especially when my MBA has 4GB of hard wired ram.
I mean, it's dynamic so I imagine the OS manages it like anything else.
echo $(( $(ioreg -l -w0 | awk -F'vramFreeBytes"=' '/vramFreeBytes/ {print $2}' | cut -d, -f1) / 1048576))
Update 12:45 PM PT: As noted by forum member SmileyDude, some machines with HD 4000 graphics have seen a VRAM boost as well, namely the 2012 Mac Mini, which now has a maximum VRAM of 1024MB, up from 768MB.
I mean, it's dynamic so I imagine the OS manages it like anything else.
Exactly. You can have a look at the IORegistry tree with "ioreg -l". There you find your graphics card and there the PerformanceStatistics subtree containing the vramFreeBytes value (measured in bytes: maximum VRAM minus used):
http://pastebin.com/5auDuPmE
To get the amount of free VRAM rounded to MB one can use the following in terminal:
Code:echo $(( $(ioreg -l -w0 | awk -F'vramFreeBytes"=' '/vramFreeBytes/ {print $2}' | cut -d, -f1) / 1048576))
Won't affect games.So, how would this effect gaming performance?
Thanks. So by dynamic do you mean it's just increasing the space the vram can increase to?
So if I update to 10.9.3 and just use my Macbook Air like I currently do (by itself), I won't have any system ram reduction?
Thanks. So by dynamic do you mean it's just increasing the space the vram can increase to?
So if I update to 10.9.3 and just use my Macbook Air like I currently do (by itself), I won't have any system ram reduction?