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A comment on Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever. Parent comment

Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by JonChesterfield on Friday March 04, 2022 @06:10AM (#30553167)
Minor point. That bios setting does dedicate some amount of ram to the GPU, so the rest of the system can't use it. The GPU can allocate more than that though if the program makes a slightly different allocate call to request it.

Seamlessly sharing memory between the two chips works fine with the compute toolchain (rocm), I don't know how transparent it is for games.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by ChuckNorris89 on Friday March 04, 2022 @06:27AM (#30553289)
>The GPU can allocate more than that though if the program makes a slightly different allocate call to request it.

Maybe in ROCM, but not in generic Windows and Linux apps and video games that I've tried. They all cap out at whatever you set in BIOS for the iGPU VRAM reservation and don't go beyond that into system RAM. If ROCM has this ability how come AMD's driver, at least in Windows, doesn't do this memory overflow thing for VRAM hungry apps like video games, as that would certainly alleviate this issue.

IMHO, still a worse implementation than the unified model of Intel. Having a large chunk of memory constantly blocked for a HW component, regardless if it's currently needed or not is just horribly inefficient, especially when you're on a mobile device and have 16GB of RAM or less to play with.

Disappointing.

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