Mac mini shared memory question

messiahmessiah
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I'm a wee bit confused about how the shared memory on the Mac mini works.



I originally thought, that a certain amount of main system memory was cordoned off for use by the graphics card?



So if for instance you had 2048MB of RAM and 128MB of shared memory, you were left with 1920MB of system RAM.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    Yeah, that is how it works although it will only use what it needs up to a maximum of 128MB on machines with 1GB Ram and 256MB in the case of machines with 2GB or more in the case of the latest machines.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    Yeah, that is how it works although it will only use what it needs up to a maximum of 128MB on machines with 1GB Ram and 256MB in the case of machines with 2GB or more in the case of the latest machines.



    That explains it. I couldn't understand why one Mac mini supported 256MB and the other only 128MB. So the chipset is smart enough to free up additional graphics memory as you upgrade your system memory.



    Elegant.
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