Force more video memory

Support Compositing and Post Processing
#1

I’ve been monitoring my video memory usage by blender lately. It seems it’s not rendering like it should for my system specs. It turns out it’s only using a maximum of 20 MB of video memory. I’ve checked into my card specs from intel. The minimum alloted memory is 4 MB, and the maximum is 64MB. The card is an intel i810. I was wondering if there was any way to force blender to take up at least 32MB of memory, and if needed go ahead and hog up all the video ram.

My laptop specs are
1.1 Ghz celeron, 768 MB RAM with that intel i810 gfx card (64mb memory). Running on windows XP home.

#2

Are you sure this is a problem in your case? Video memory is used for display purposes only (not for F12-rendering) - mainly for frame buffers, z-buffer and textures. The only situation I can think of where allocating less video memory than possible could have an impact on (display-) performance would be if there are so many image textures that they don’t fit into available video memory, forcing the system to constantly re-transfer them to the graphics card from system memory.
A rough calculation shows that a resolution of 1600x1200 at 32bpp with tripple buffers takes about 16MB of memory (maybe some more due to z-buffers etc), so to me 20MB doesn’t sound too far off…

#3

AH. thanks for clarifying. I was being told that blender uses video memory more than system memory. I was baffled by this. Not so much of a problem now. Thanks. I was just wondering if it was XP or something new with blender. I skipped a few versions since i was sort of away from civilization for almost a year.

#4

Glad I could help :slight_smile: