09-05-2007 04:05
I've been just happily using the Linux Alpha for a long time without watching the development progress details--since before automatic VRAM detection. Now I see that the viewer parses the /var/log/Xorg logfile--where in my case it's apparently finding:

(--) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 131072 kByte, Type: DDR3

and deciding:

2007-09-05T10:25:29Z INFO: createContext: X11 log-parser detected 128MB VRAM.

which sounds perfectly reasonable--except that the card has 256MB (it's an ATI X800XL), as the Catalyst Control Panel reports. From what I've been able to gather from the web, 128MB is all X11 knows about, but the whole 256MB is available to the GPU (and presumably, to OpenGL). So... which of these capacities should matter to SL? If the viewer can use the 256MB, is there still a way to override the auto-detected value? (Or is this all bogus and an Xorg setting needs fixed?) I thought I remembered manually setting it to 256MB "back in the day," but that's a pretty misty memory at this point.