Graphics Memory

[Pythia]

Can anyone tell me why Virtualbox configuration for a guest shows 256 MB of graphics memory, and in the Windows 10 guest the Virtualbox Graphics Adaptor for Windows 8+ shows having 384 MB? The guest does crash reliably during intense video usage, such as Goto Meeting.

The Virtualbox version is 5.0.20. The host is Debian 8.

[BillG]

VirtualBox does not use the graphics card of the host machine. It uses its own emulated graphics "hardware".

[Pythia]

Bill - this is seen by the Windows 10 guest, as "Virtualbox Graphics Adaptor for Windows 8+". the issue is that the video memory configured in the Virtualbox vm is less than what the guest o/s sees.

[mpack]

This is a user forum. If you have a bug report (for current VirtualBox) you want the devs to see then best raise a BugTracker ticket. First be sure of your facts however, e.g. it crosses my mind to wonder how you established the veritas of the number reported by Windows, and ensured that you aren't comparing apples with oranges (e.g. VRAM is not the same as RAM that the guest might have reserved for graphics).

[socratis]

I tried it with my Win10 VM and the amount of VRAM reported is VM_Assigned_VRAM + 128 MB. So, for your 256MB it's going to report 384MB. Similarly if you assign 128 MB VRAM, Win10 will report 256MB, and so on, and so on. All of the memory is declared as "Dedicated".

Funny thing, if you uninstall the guest additions, no matter how much VRAM you allocate to the VM, Win10 always reports 1023MB of VRAM, which is declared as "Shared". I tried to find any references on the webs, but came up empty handed.

The thing is that the same thing happens with Win 7, 8.1 and 10. I only tried with GAs installed.