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Mini Geforce 9400m w/ 512mb memory?

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david594

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 21, 2008
16
0
So to start off, I purchased the new base model mac mini and swapped in 4 gig of ram I purchased. As expected my video memory got bumped from the 128mb (with 1 gig ram) to 256mb(with 4 gig ram).

No big surprises there.

Then today using boot camp I installed Windows XP on my mac mini and go and check out my video card settings and am surprised to see its showing the 9400 as having 512mb of memory.

Anyone else noticed this? Any way we could get OSX to support the 512mb of memory?
 
Not sure if there is any way to get more RAM to be dedicated to VRAM on the mini under OSX. However, I wouldn't really worry about it. The 9400M is much too slow to really make use of that much video ram. The benefits would be negligible.
 
the last two Thinkpad's I've had with ATi cards have reported the 'video ram' incorrectly. I'm not sure if it is XP or what, but it wouldn't surprise me.


david594 said:
So to start off, I purchased the new base model mac mini and swapped in 4 gig of ram I purchased. As expected my video memory got bumped from the 128mb (with 1 gig ram) to 256mb(with 4 gig ram).

No big surprises there.

Then today using boot camp I installed Windows XP on my mac mini and go and check out my video card settings and am surprised to see its showing the 9400 as having 512mb of memory.

Anyone else noticed this? Any way we could get OSX to support the 512mb of memory?
Click to expand...
 
gkarris said:
The nVidia drivers for Windows may allot more memory up to 512 Megs for PC games.

Mac OS X may limit it to 256 Megs. May change with Snow Leopard?
Click to expand...

Yes, that's Windows driver bonus related to shared memory based video cards.

I have a 512MB ATI card in a PC that shows up as 1152MB in Vista.

Doesn't seem to do much unless running game at hi-res.

Cheers,
 
panzer06 said:
Yes, that's Windows driver bonus related to shared memory based video cards.

I have a 512MB ATI card in a PC that shows up as 1152MB in Vista.

Doesn't seem to do much unless running game at hi-res.

Cheers,
Click to expand...

As I said in an earlier post, I believe windows is incorrectly reporting, as in both my cases, the video chip manufacturer stated the maximum, yet windows reported higher. I believe the same applies here. Check the Nvidia site
 
9400M memory under Windows Boot Camp.

I have a MacBook which has a 32 GB partition for BootCamp because I already had some of the newer games like COD4 and COD5 also Crysis, however it will show 512MB but it still only uses 256K it is just the way Windows reacts to the drivers and software bc COD runs fine, a little laggy if the resolution is not turned down, especially Anti Aliasing must be turned off, but Crysis runs but barely compared to my Uni MBP 2.66 with a true 512MB Discrete VG, then the Nvidia card works fine.

The 9400M is still better then 90% of the Windows laptops that still use an Intel integrated video card, and then bc of Vista may only have 256BM but Vista shows the card at max resolution at 1256 or 1748 but it is only virtual ram and not really great for extreme graphic needs.


Just my $.02 and I still love the 9400M over the older Macs with the integrated 64MB Intel graphics.
 
david594 said:
I installed Windows XP on my mac mini and go and check out my video card settings and am surprised to see its showing the 9400 as having 512mb of memory. Anyone else noticed this? Any way we could get OSX to support the 512mb of memory?
Click to expand...

My 9300-based hackintosh can have 512 mb of shared memory (I have it set to 256 mb in the BIOS and have not installed the driver for 512 mb support). Will Apple write the driver for it? Who knows, but I highly doubt it. What do you need 512 mb for anyway?
 
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