[Discuss] Conflicting Information Regarding Video Memory

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

epp at mcom.com wrote: 
> This PC has an on-board AMD RS780L (Radeon 3000) GPU. The lspci command
> is showing it is allocated 256 Mb of RAM. Although the glxinfo
> command is displaying the same 256 Mb, it also indicates 'total
> available memory' as 765 Mb. I had been contemplating purchasing a
> video card for this, but as the only ports inside it are PCI Express
> x1, the only video cards I've been able to find have no more than 512
> Mb on them.
> 
> If 765 Mb is more accurate, then I will leave it as it is, as the card
> would override any on-board graphics.

You can allocate up to 768MB of RAM via BIOS options. This
affects the complexity of the graphics that can be rendered but
doesn't affect the speed very much.

The motherboard *should* have a PCIe2.0 x16 slot available for a
better graphics card. If so, you can get a new-in-box Radeon
5450 for about $50 US, which will be roughly 3x faster and use
its own RAM instead of the main RAM.

-dsr-