MazonnaCara89[MOD] SteamDeck upgrade to 32gb of ram
kaduTo be honest, RAM amount is far from being relevant on the Steam Deck. RAM speed is what’s crucially limiting it, and even a minor overclock gives noticeable improvements.
Adding new Samsung chips to achieve 32GB isn’t that relevant. Adding new chips that can sustain higher clocks and overclocking… Now we are talking.
enkiThe GPU is integrated and uses system RAM as VRAM. Increasing the available VRAM should improve performance in titles with lots of high-res textures.
Yes, I know - it’s an APU.
But you’re incorrect - adding more RAM to be allocated as VRAM is useless if the GPU isn’t making use of it. In the case of the Steam Deck, it has been demonstrated quite a few times that the main bottleneck is the memory speeds. Even a slight overclock gives significant boosts in performance, it’s quite surprising in fact.
You and that other technological genius are wrong. The device ships with 8GB of RAM and tools like CryoUtilities allow for more of that to allocated to the GPU framebuffer. This allows for measurably better performance. Cryo does this by increasing allocated GPU VRAM and enabling more swapping of RAM to disk, thereby giving the deck more usable VRAM.
OLD | EASY Performance Boosts for Steam Deck!
You’re boldly confident about something you couldn’t be more wrong.
To begin with, Cryoutilities doesn’t set the UNA framebuffer - it recommends the users does so, but it can’t do it by itself. Cryoutilities only changes page files.
The UMA framebuffer on the Steam Deck isn’t VRAM. That’s a misconception often spread around. It’s the minimum amount the GPU would like to allocate generally, but on the Steam Deck in particular, this number is ignored and the CPU holds priority for the shared memory pool - you can set it at 512 MB or 4GB and it won’t change a thing. The GPU will allocate as much as it needs regardless, and the CPU will steal this memory if it ever needs it - even in the middle of rendering a frame.
So yeah, none of what you just said applies to the Deck. Cryo still recommends setting it at 4GB (though he is unable to show consistently that it helps) because combined with his swap modifications, this can indeed trick software not designed for the Deck into thinking there’s less memory pressure and therefore avoiding aggressive swap usage, which would create stutters.
Your interpretation of the UMA framebuffer as the VRAM allocated to the system is not correct.
You are both rather uninformed. RAM can enable games to use more c library headers and avoid stack smashing by way of the UPC bussing through the central wafer. The reason why valve doesn’t use this bus path like they CAN is because the propagation delay is not even close to being a bottleneck on the lesser capacity chip but when you have 32gb chip, for example, the sequential NAND configuration doesn’t do any better at allocating memory because the pointers aren’t using malloc() in the transport layer anymore.
You okay there, buddy? Not smelling any burnt toast, right?
wtf did I just read?
I’m not wrong I just skipped a step in describing the value of having more RAM you egotistical cumstain… Cryo33 doesn’t just recommended increasing the GPU allocation in the recovery tools he practically states it’s a must.
And it’s really telling how practically every other x86 handheld starts at 16GB but please do shit on the basic premise that we should have more RAM because it’s so fundamentally flawed.
I’ll chime in and say all three of you are wrong and I refuse to elaborate further.