⟨FRKD⟩

Hi, I'm Oleksandr. I learned a lot from the Internet to understand many things like technologies, science, nature, and this helped me a lot to get my things done. This is the place where I share my experience and thoughts so others can learn something useful and get their things done too.

How to increase MacBook video RAM

Published:
Topics: macos, gpu

Once upon a time, I was very frustrated with the amount of RAM used by integrated Intel GPU on my MacBook Pro. I always was low on memory while working with graphics-intensive apps which were using Metal acceleration for computing. I believed that GPU is sharing a memory with CPU so the limits are software. After some googling and researching I’ve managed out how to increase 1.5GB to 4GB.

Here are step-by-step instructions how to do that. Use on your own risk.

  1. Reboot your Mac into Recovery Mode by restarting your computer and holding down ⌘+R until the Apple logo appears on your screen.

  2. Click Utilities > Terminal.

  3. Type and run:

    csrutil disable

    This disables System integrity protection as we need to modify/patch system files.

  4. Reboot your Mac.

  5. If you have macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and above, open Terminal and run:

    sudo mount -uw /

  6. Get Intel graphics platform ID:

    ioreg -l | grep ig-platform-id

    you’ll get something like: "AAPL,ig-platform-id" = <0700260d>

    Remember your ID.

  7. Find a "Intel framebuffer" kext in use:

    kextstat | grep Framebuffer

    the output will be like com.apple.driver.AppleIntelFramebufferAzul

  8. Open respective framebuffer kext file in hex editor: /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelFramebufferAzul.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleIntelFramebufferAzul

  9. Find your Intel ID from step 6 (mine was 0700260d) and you’ll see something like:

    0700260d 01030403 00000004 00002002 00005001 00000060

  10. Replace 00000060 (1.5Gb) with FFFFFFFF (4Gb):

    0700260d 01030403 00000004 00002002 00005001 FFFFFFFF

  11. Refresh the kext cache and reboot:

    sudo kextcache -i /sudo reboot

Done. You have 4GB of video RAM.