Any way to modify AGP memory allocation settings in Laptop?

[Skaven]

My friend has a 600m with Radeon 9000 32mb video. He needs more GFX memory for Civ4, but I can't find anything in the BIOS or the Omega drivers that will allow him to allocate more memory to the card. Is there some program out there that will allocate system memory to the video card?

 

[IlllI]

doubtful

 

[bearxor]

No, the Radeon 9000 chip in the 600m has dedicated graphics memory. You get to pick between 32 or 64 when you order it. If he needs more memory for a light gaming laptop, he should look at upgrading to a i6000, which isn't much bigger, and can be equipped with a Radeon X300 128MB card.

There are also other brands that have 14" laptops with better cards in them, but I'll leave that to someone else since I'm more of a Delxpert from having sold them for two years.

 

[Skaven]

Ok - let me add some fuel to this discussion. I have another laptop that has a built-in intel video chip (Extreme Graphics 2) with 32mb memory. In the laptop's bios I can allocate more memory to the AGP card and I get better Civ4 performance than the ATI 9000 32mb! I would find it hard to believe that the intel card is actually faster than the ATI card. I'll have to try bumping down the allocated AGP memory to see if it adversely affects in-game performance. I thought that was what AGP was all about, allowing the vid-card to access system memory when it ran out? As far as I can tell on the Dell 600m there is no way to do this!

 

[fbrdphreak]

AGP means you don't have shared memory. Integrated graphics share memory from the main system RAM, which is what allows you to change the amount of VRAM allocation. AGP cards have dedicated amounts of memory only.

 

[Skaven]

Ok - so that was the missing key to the equation: the integrated chips don't even have local memory - I should have looked at the Toshiba's specs:

"Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 w/8MB-128MB shared video memory"