integratedgpu Will a ram upgrade also fix some vram usage issues?

[Seth B 5812]

Hey I have a 4 year old HP-pavillion 15 laptop with a ryzen 5 4000 CPU that is not gaming focused but after college is what I now use it for, one game that I play I'm getting only 20-30 fps max and 15 on the low end, I used task manager and windows game bar to view my hardware usage and CPU is staying around 70, IGPU around 35, ram around 85, and vram at 90. Will installing more ram also increase my vram, in doing my own research I've heard that it can pull from the CPU and others state it pulls from ram. Any info at all would be helpful and is greatly appreciated. Thank you guys.

[Eigenvektor]

If your GPU runs out of VRAM, it will spill over to RAM. But that kills your performance due to the lower bandwidth and added latency. So it's not something you want. Adding more RAM doesn't really help. Only more VRAM would (which isn't possible).

 

If you're talking about an iGPU, those are typically limited to 2 GB of RAM being used/shared as VRAM. Adding more will only increase the amount of RAM that is left over for the CPU. The primary limiting factor of iGPUs is generally the speed of the RAM.

[Seth B 5812]

18 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

If your GPU runs out of VRAM, it will spill over to RAM. But that kills your performance due to the lower bandwidth and added latency. So it's not something you want. Adding more RAM doesn't really help. Only more VRAM would (which isn't possible).

 

If you're talking about an iGPU, those are typically limited to 2 GB of RAM being used/shared as VRAM. Adding more will only increase the amount of RAM that is left over for the CPU. The primary limiting factor of iGPUs is generally the speed of the RAM.

Well I did neglected to mention that I have already order more ram because I needed the ram regardless, going from a single stick to two channel and slightly higher mhz, thank you for assist and yes it is a integrated GPU, but so to clarify you are saying in my case when the gpu's vram is too much it spills over to the ram which is slightly slower because (I'm assuming) that isnt what the ram was intended for?... Or is the ram also storing and using the vram and my SI just locked it down a little bit to small for what I'm needing (2gb). (Sorry if this was confusing or poorly written, I'm trying to wrap my head around how this works)

[Eigenvektor]

27 minutes ago, Seth B 5812 said:

yes it is a integrated GPU, but so to clarify you are saying in my case when the gpu's vram is too much it spills over to the ram which is slightly slower because (I'm assuming) that isnt what the ram was intended for?

And integrated GPU doesn't have its own VRAM. It is always reserving some of your RAM to use as VRAM (e.g. 2 GB), which is then inaccessible to the CPU. Compared to actual dedicated VRAM of a discrete GPU this is much slower and it is sharing bandwidth with the CPU.

 

Going from single channel to dual channel and higher MHz should definitely help in this case. iGPUs require fast RAM to get as much performance as possible.

 

What I said about spilling over is more important for discrete GPUs. If they run out of their own dedicated VRAM, they will also start to use RAM. But that is a lot slower. They now have to access RAM over the PCIe bus, instead of their directly attached VRAM. This can drastically lower performance.

 

An iGPU always uses RAM as VRAM, so running out of reserved memory and spilling over into the CPU's section of RAM makes no difference, since it's physically the same RAM as before.