Notebook Video, Display and Touch

Hello Dear HP support team,

I have a bug to report or a feature request.

On my new HP 17-ca1211ng there is no BIOS setting to adjust the amount of RAM that is reserved for the integrated graphics of the AMD Ryzen APU. This wouldn't be a problem if the default value was set to a reasonable value. But instead the setting is fixed to block 2 GB RAM (of total 8 GB) that can not be used by the operating system or applications - Windows can only use 5,9 GB of RAM. Same in Linux, obviously.

As I never intend to use the laptop for gaming I will never use that much video RAM. One could say that one fourth of the (non-expandable) RAM is wasted. And even for gaming purposes, reserving 2 GB wouldn't make any sense. There is a nice techspot-article about this: https://www.techspot.com/article/1578-amd-raven-ridge-reserved-memory-explainer/ tl-dr of this article: Reserving 2 GB of RAM for the Ryzen/Vega APU doesn't make any sense. Not even for gaming as there is no measurable performance gain, but outside of gaming you lose a lot of RAM that could be better used for the operating system of applications.

I would like to propose that HP should publish a BIOS-update to allow users to set the amount of RAM reserved for the integrated graphics. Or at least drastically reduce the pre-set number to a much lower value. For example 256 MB.

Best regards,

Steffen_Gans