# somehow use graphics card memory



## nekoexmachina (Jun 23, 2010)

Hello, forums.
I'm going to upgrade my graphic hardware on freebsd desktop, and almost any variant on chipset that i see reasonable have at least 512Mb of graphical memory (moreover, most of them have 1024).

Is there almost any variant to use that huge (256 to 768 MB) amount of memory as swap or something like that?

Also, all cards im interested in are nvidia, and of course with evil binary blob as xorg driver.


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## SirDice (Jun 23, 2010)

nekoexmachina said:
			
		

> Is there almost any variant to use that huge (256 to 768 MB) amount of memory as swap or something like that?


Quick answer, nope.


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## nekoexmachina (Jun 23, 2010)

> Quick answer, nope.


and long answer?
Anything useful will be interesting (e.g. else than playing modern high-tech games).


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## SirDice (Jun 23, 2010)

nekoexmachina said:
			
		

> and long answer?


Somewhat longer, you cannot use that memory for anything else.


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## nekoexmachina (Jun 23, 2010)

Too bad.


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## nekoexmachina (Jun 23, 2010)

Hm, i've remembered that i definetely saw an article about subj somewhere, so gave it a deeper googling, and found that: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Using_Graphics_Card_Memory_as_Swap
But well, i choose 3d accel with vdpau, not swap. Also dunno does fbsd has that features described there.


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## Alt (Jun 23, 2010)

You can add more ram it should be cheaper xD


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## nekoexmachina (Jun 23, 2010)

> You can add more ram it should be cheaper xD


I see that, and that is cheaper. But gmem is still wasted to nothing.


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## hedwards (Jun 23, 2010)

Ultimately, you almost certainly wouldn't want to. While it might be quicker than swap, it's going to be quite sluggish. Mostly because it's designed to be quick in only one direction as graphics cards aren't at this point meant to do too much communicating back to the CPU.


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## fronclynne (Jun 23, 2010)

*Landon Donovan, though, is pretty happy-making!*



			
				hedwards said:
			
		

> Ultimately, you almost certainly wouldn't want to. While it might be quicker than swap, it's going to be quite sluggish. Mostly because it's designed to be quick in only one direction as graphics cards aren't at this point meant to do too much communicating back to the CPU.



Not only that, but in my experience, graphics memory is cheap & fast, but really error prone.  Which doesn't matter when  you're just pushing frames at the monitor:  a flipped bit or a trash frame is already in the past, with primary storage though, apps dumping core is pretty angrifying.


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## wblock@ (Jun 23, 2010)

nekoexmachina said:
			
		

> Hm, i've remembered that i definetely saw an article about subj somewhere, so gave it a deeper googling, and found that: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Using_Graphics_Card_Memory_as_Swap
> But well, i choose 3d accel with vdpau, not swap. Also dunno does fbsd has that features described there.



Technically, I don't think there's any reason you couldn't reimplement that on FreeBSD.  Find/make some replacement for mtd, hack it into mdconfig.  Probably an interesting project.

Practically, how many machines have you seen with a 512M video card yet so little main memory that they swap?  It's the little PII with 128M of RAM that needs swap, but few people are going to put a big video card in that.

As far as wasting that video RAM, it would be nice to think that the video card would only power up used banks.  Don't know if any of them actually do.


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