Quick Question about teh Intel 810 Chipset and video

[The Stigenator]

my brother gave my dad an emachine for F'day. its a 800 mhz model, nice machine. my major concern is that its got only 4MB of video memory onboard.

this machine is going to be used mainly for normal 2d stuff hardly an 3d ever. My question is that can that 4mb be bumped to a higher memory.. i thought the 810 chipset could take upto 11mb of video ram.. how do i do that on this emachine?

 

[Angrymarshmello]

tgg - I might be thinking of the i815, (I remember I had both the 810 and the 815 a while back, can't remember which one I did this on) but in the BIOS you should be able to set it to "suck up" a specified amount of system ram and use it as video memory.

 

[Angrymarshmello]

Actually it can't be adjusted by the user according to Intel's site:

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/intel810/tti005.htm

(Guess it was the 815 then)

 

[yellowperil]

I have the i810 (stop snickering) and there is no setting in BIOS to adjust allocating video memory.

 

[Mapidus]

810 based systems do not have any "on-board" memory. Memory for the frame buffer is allocated from main memory. Textures are stored in system memory and transfered to the chipset using agp. The 4 meg memory you are referring to might be the video cache. Some 810 motherboards have this 4 megs of video cache that is used to store the z-buffer. You really don't need more than 4 megs for the z-buffer since this will support up to a 1600 X 1200 16 bit frame buffer -- not even sure if the 810 will go up this high, but if it did, the frame rate would be very, very low. I think that this video cache is only used for the z-buffer, but it might also be used for the frame buffer, but it is definately not used for textures since any i7XX series video chipsets are purely AGP texturing units.