How to Increase Dedicated Video RAM (VRAM) in Windows 10

What Is Dedicated Video RAM?

Video RAM (or VRAM, pronounced "VEE-ram") is a special type of RAM that works with your computer's graphics processing unit, or GPU.

The GPU is a chip on your computer's graphics card (or video card) that's responsible for displaying images on your screen. Though technically incorrect, the terms GPU and graphics card are often used interchangeably.

Your video RAM holds information that the GPU needs, including game textures and lighting effects. This allows the GPU to quickly access the info and output video to your monitor.

Using video RAM for this task is much faster than using your system RAM, because video RAM is right next to the GPU in the graphics card. VRAM is built for this high-intensity purpose and it's thus "dedicated."

How To Check Your VRAM

You can easily view the amount of video RAM you have in Windows 10 by following these steps:

1. Open the Settings menu by pressing Windows Key + I.
2. Select the System entry, then click Display on the left sidebar.
3. Scroll down and click the Advanced display settings text.
4. On the resulting menu, select the monitor you'd like to view settings for (if necessary). Then click the Display adapter properties text at the bottom.
5. In a new window, you'll see your current video RAM listed next to Dedicated Video Memory.
6. Under Adapter Type, you'll see the name of your Nvidia or AMD graphics card, depending on what device you have. If you see AMD Accelerated Processing Unit or Intel HD Graphics (more likely), you're using integrated graphics.

How To Increase VRAM

The best way to increase your video RAM is to purchase a graphics card. If you're using integrated graphics and suffer from poor performance, upgrading to a dedicated card (even a solid budget graphics card) will do wonders for your video output.

However, if this isn't an option for you (like on laptops), you may be able to increase your dedicated VRAM in two ways.

Increase VRAM In The BIOS

The First Is Adjusting The VRAM Allocation In Your Computer's BIOS. To do that,

1. Enter Your BIOS and Look For An Option In The Menu Named Advanced Features, Advanced Chipset Features, Or Similar.
2. Inside That, Look For A Secondary Category Called Something Close To Graphics Settings, Video Settings, Or VGA Share Memory Size.
3. These should contain an option to adjust how much memory you allocate to the GPU. The default is usually 128MB; try upping this to 256MB or 512MB if you have enough to spare.

Not every CPU or BIOS has this option, though. If you can't change it, there's a workaround that might help you.

Faking A VRAM Increase

Because most integrated graphics solutions automatically adjust to use the amount of system RAM they need, the details reported in the Adapter Properties window do not really matter. In fact, for integrated graphics, the Dedicated Video Memory value is completely fictitious. The system reports that dummy value simply so games would something when they check how much VRAM that you have.

Therefore, you can modify a Registry value to change the amount VRAM your system reports to games. This doesn't actually increase your VRAM; it just modifies that dummy value. If a game refuses to start because you "don't have enough VRAM," upping this value might fix that.

1. Open a Registry Editor window by typing regedit into the Start Menu. Remember that you can mess up your system in the Registry, so take care while here.
2. Head to the following location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Intel
3. Right-click the Intel folder on the left sidebar and choose New > Key. Name this key GMM. Once you've made it, select the new GMM folder on the left and right-click inside the right side.
4. Select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name this DedicatedSegmentSize and give it a value, making sure to select the Decimal option.
5. In megabytes, the minimum value is 0 (disabling the entry) and the maximum is 512. Set this value, restart your computer, and see if it helps a game run.

These methods aren't guaranteed to work, but they're still worth a try if you run into issues. If you don't have a lot of system RAM and are having trouble running games with integrated graphics, try adding some additional RAM for the integrated graphics to use. Like most tasks, this is usually next to impossible to upgrade on a laptop and simple on a desktop.

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