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OS X 10.9.3 Boosts Maximum VRAM of Recent Retina MacBook Pro and MacBook Air Models
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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.
Don't know that I like this, especially when my MBA has 4GB of hard wired ram.
Exactly. VRAM doesn't just include a framebuffer - you can allocate memory on the GPU for other things which aren't on screen right now, or as general-purpose memory in the case of OpenCL.
Increasing the VRAM share for the IGP only has limited benefits in terms of OpenCL support, but can be useful where you do actually need to do a copy (rather than a map) because you need to mutate the data buffer afterwards, or for poorly-written code which doesn't recognise that it can just do a map on an IGP. I don't know what the real-world tests show, but it's possible that this is a factor.
Not at all. Any games that actually need a gig of video memory are certainly too demanding for the intel 5000 integrated chip anyway. So it's irrelevant to gaming.
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.
I can confirm that, I'm still on 10.9.2 and have 1024 MB of VRAM according to the same system info panel on my 2012 mini.
(Starting the update to 10.9.3 right now...)
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))Same here with a 2012 MacBook Air.
I'll double check on my sister's 2011.
I was thinking HD 4000 would use only 512 MB, but that referred to an older OS.
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?
My understanding is that it's shared RAM so depending on the OS, it may feel like it needs to allocate the full 1gb to VRAM or whatever other thing you have going on
Correct. When an integrated GPU is used (if your Mac has two GPUs then you might want to give gfxCardStatus http://gfx.io a try) OS X uses a specific amount of RAM as VRAM for the integrated GPU. This is done by the kernel (kernel_task) so you won't see the actual amount of VRAM currently used in Activity Monitor since the kernel needs also RAM for itself and other purposes like eg. disk cache. The maximum VRAM value is just a sort of indicator helping the kernel to optimize RAM usage.
It's not about "system ram" but that doesn't matter at all. Don't even think about such things unless you're a kernel hacker and do display driver programming, OpenCL optimisation and the like for a living.
As nearly any other stuff that deals with limited resources it's a game of trade-offs. And the folks at Apple have done this for a specific reason. The increase of maximum VRAM for some Intel GPUs is accompanied by many changes in system frameworks utilizing GPU stuff. So even if 10.9.3 might decrease the amount of RAM your apps are able to use by a few mbytes the system (or user experience in general) will be faster and snappier.