video memory

[mike0138]

hi, i installed kbuntu on my laptop, the thing is that on windos on dxdiag memory looks like this

Display Devices
---------------
Card name: ATI Radeon 3100 Graphics
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type: ATI Radeon 3100 Graphics (0x9613)
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9613&SUBSYS_FF001179&REV_00
Display Memory: 1406 MB
Dedicated Memory: 254 MB
Shared Memory: 1151 MB

and on kbuntu memory looks like this:

$ lspci -v -s 01:05.0
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS780MC [Radeon HD 3100 Graphics]
Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device ff62
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 2297
Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
I/O ports at 6000 [size=256]
Memory at d6400000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at d6300000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: fglrx_pci
Kernel modules: fglrx

so what is my real video memory ?? can i asign memory from ram to display memory? help please..

[lmilano]

Re: video memory

Hi

It looks consistent:

Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]

The non-prefetchable memory reported below that line is read only memory. Are you having any troubles with the display?

[kevinc]

Re: video memory

Display Memory: 1406 MB
Dedicated Memory: 254 MB
Shared Memory: 1151 MB

Your ATi card has 256MB and you have, probably, 1024MB (1G) plus 128MB memory, which windows allows to be shared between applications and display. I think that this is a dynamic allocation, not static, so it depends on the need at a given time.

Kubuntu uses all of your memory and video memory and generally does a good job. I found this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766683 and this (although Intel, seems to apply)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582

[mike0138]

Re: video memory

hi thanks for the replies, then thing is that when i play dvd movies or watch a stream video image does not syncronize correctly, so my fist guess was that something was wrong with video memory, i'm using a laptop, so i think that viedeo memory should be shared with the sistem memory, wich works on windows but not on linux, so is there a way change this? (no option on bios) currently video is very slow with compiz runing but even if i change it back to default, dvd movies look desincronized, what could be the problem

[lmilano]

Re: video memory

I see. Both Linux and Windows report 256 Mb, so that is fine. Your ATI integrated graphics (IGP) should work ok for 2D graphics (including DVD playback) with the default driver, which is open source. So, there is something weird. It could be the desktop effects, but you say you already tried disabling them, and it didn't help. This (OS) driver does not support 3D hardware acceleration.

ATI is working on helping the Linux community produce Open Source drivers. In the meantime, they produce a binary driver (windows like, where you can't see how it is written). This driver works very nicely when it works, but there had been some serious issues in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04. If you want to try it, and don't care risking breaking things, you can try this driver. It's called catalyst. The easiest way to try it is to go to the menu, SYstem, Hardware Drivers, and enable the one for the ATI card. Again, this may give you better graphics, or break graphics altogether. It's not kubuntu's fault, there is no way to support binary drivers effectively.

Hope this helps!