On 10/04/2014 07:19 PM Valeri Galtsev wrote: > Many curse AMD video chips (for laptop) in this thread. Are these only > "shared memory" chips that people have reason not to like? Or real > "discrete" AMD (former ATI) chips are bad on laptops as well? If there are > any. (Are there any with their own dedicated video RAM?). What about > NVIDIA as a comparison? (I'm not asking about intel which sits inside CPU > case and definitely is "shared memory" type, - or I'm wrong?) > > In the past (and my experience was still the same recently) NVIDIA had too > little disclosed about internals of their chips, so there was no way to > write open source driver covering more than just generics (not too trivial > thing is, e.g.: two screens of different resolution on the same chip). ATI > (then, before they were bought out by AMD) video chips (again, the real > ones with "discrete" video memory) had better publicly accessible > documentation, so open source video drivers for them were waaay better > (ATI cards were my life savers! And still are). What is the state of the > art in that respect now? (I guess, having "Sr" in my job title I should do > my homework myself, still nor being "sr" citizen yet, but just lazy I feel > it would be great to hear what experts say). Valeri, good topic! I sincerely *hope* that it isn't some kind of trend that video cards are using shared memory instead of dedicated memory on the card itself. All machines I've bought or built since the late '90s have had video cards with a .5G of dedicated memory. This is mostly because video memory is physically different, using static RAM rather than dynamic RAM. The former is something like ten times faster than the latter. (It's been a long time since I read up on this, so forgive me and correct me if that number is off-- it might be too small.) Static RAM is, however, more expensive. So PC manufacturers, in trying to reduce costs so's to increase profits when- and wherever possible find this a convenient place to cut quality because most consumers know nothing about video cards, let alone video RAM. Just last week I was looking at the "specs" on laptops of a major vendor and that webpage didn't even mention a video card! Perhaps I've become too cynical, but it's hard to believe that was an oversight. Is there a command or script which reveals the amount of dedicated video RAM, if any, is on a machine's video card? If so, it should be included on the live CD, so that when we're shopping, we can quickly determine that. If not, it would bestow much kudos upon a developer to provide us such a command or script.