Sooo apparently there's this myth that only Apple has "unified memory"...?

Every single modern integrated graphics system works the same way. They even share the MM code in Linux.

I just had a reply guy try to argue otherwise with me even when I told him I wrote the driver 😭

I know ancient iGPUs had that thing for setting the GPU memory size in the BIOS, but that's aaaaaancient and completely obsolete. If you still have that, just set it to the minimum value. The rest of memory will be unified.

Apple dedicates a tiny bit of RAM secretly too!

@lina my arch machine has an AMD dedicated GPU with the dedicated memory allocation setting in BIOS, but I'm not actually sure it does anything since I have all my memory available when I boot into Linux (with the amdgpu driver). Are you saying that if a modern Linux computer has that kind of BIOS setting, that it should be reduced to a minimum? Or just on older machines?

@thufie On any modern integrated graphics system, it should be reduced to the minimum. Discrete graphics systems don't have that (or the option does nothing), but you may be confusing it with something about a "GPU aperture" which is a different concept.

Discrete graphics systems obviously don't have true unified memory since they have discrete VRAM that is separate (they can share memory but with tradeoffs, the point of unified memory systems is there are no tradeoffs).

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@lina it is a laptop GPU with no dedicated VRAM, but this clarified why it is a different case, thank you! :)

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