Keep in mind that by reducing the amount of RAM reserved for the APU’s iGPU, you potentially reduce its performance as it will have less reserved memory to rely on. However, if you have an APU but also a dedicated graphics (something frequent especially in laptop) then you are not interested in the APU which reserves RAM memory as you already have a dedicated graphics so this tutorial will be extremely helpful.
RAM consumption with an AMD Ryzen APU
When you have an APU, some of the system RAM will inevitably be reserved for use, which means that the effective amount of memory on the PC will be used up. On a desktop PC with 16GB of RAM, this is probably not too much of a problem, but if you have a laptop with only 8GB, the iGPU consuming a little over 2GB can be a problem, as it will leave something less than 6 GB for everything else.
Unfortunately, there is no direct way to change the amount of RAM the system reserves for the graphics built into the APU, but it’s not something we can’t change; it’s just a bit more laborious, although, as you’ll see below, it’s not complicated either.
How to reduce the RAM consumed by APUs
You should keep in mind that the procedure we are going to show you below may differ depending on the model and brand of your motherboard, and especially in laptops you might find yourself in the position where you cannot find it. this option (it is not frequent, but in some manufacturers have decided to remove it). In our example, we are using a desktop PC with an ASRock motherboard and an AMD Ryzen 3 2200G APU with Vega graphics.
The first thing to do is restart your computer and enter BIOS in the normal way.
The option we are looking for is in Advanced Options -> Onboard Devices Configuration, and it is called “UMA Frame buffer Size”.
This is where we can select how much RAM we want to allocate per hardware to the integrated graphics. Obviously, if you have a dedicated graphic in your system, be it a desktop or a laptop, you want to allocate as much RAM as you can afford, although if the graphic you are using is the built-in one, we will tell you. do not recommend assigning it less. of 256MB even if you are not using the PC to play, because if you have a Full HD screen and want to play a video, you will already be using this amount of memory.
Once you have made this change, all you need to do is save the changes in the BIOS and restart the computer. This parameter defaults to “Auto”, and the maximum is assigned (2048MB of RAM, which Windows interprets as 2.1GB), but after setting it to 256MB, Windows detects that it has 327MB reserved by the hardware (why Windows detects that the allocated amount is higher, we cannot tell) as you can see in the following image.
This way we will have drastically reduced the amount of RAM consumed by the AMD Ryzen APU (for Intel it works more or less the same and the procedure is the same, in fact), leaving more for the rest of the programs. . Of course, as we warned at the beginning, you should keep in mind that this may reduce the performance of the computer in activities that require the use of the graphics power of the computer, especially in games.
