MacBook Pro 17" Early 2011 running without the AMD GPU

Question

Well, after my Discrete GPU failed for third time, I decide to eliminate it from the system, and followed the instruction from LangLangC in:

GPU problem - Boot Hangs on Grey Screen

All works fine except when opening applications that need GPU acceleration, like Photos.

In that situations glitched zones appear on the screen until the application quits.

Will upgrading RAM provide more shared memory for the HD Graphics 3000 to access?

At this time, after hack the shared memory to the GPU reached 1536 MB, as is shown in About This Mac.

The Terminal commands for this are:

Add more VRAM

@arqueox try these steps they 100% work this time to increase from stock 512 MB to 1536 MB VRAM:

cd /S*/L*/Ext*/AppleIntelSNBGraphicsFB.kext/C*/M*

sudo cp AppleIntelSNBGraphicsFB AppleIntelSNBGraphicsFB.backup

sudo perl -pi -e 's|\xC7\x45\xD0\x00\x00\x00\x20|\xC7\x45\xD0\x00\x00\x00\x60|g' AppleIntelSNBGraphicsFB

sudo touch /S*/L*/Extensions

Thanks to @arqueox for having tested the Info.plist before reboot/restart you have to edit this file:

/System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelHD3000Graphics.kext/Contents/Info.plist

Adding after these strings, this part:

<key>VRAMMethod</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>VRAMOverride</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>VRAMSize</key>
<integer>1536</integer>

After edited the plist from Terminal type:

sudo chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/Extensions && sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions

sudo kextcache -i /

sudo reboot

Answer 1

Adding extra memory to the system is not going to improve the graphics, I'm afraid.

The Intel HD3000 has a hardware limitation of approx. 1.7 GB of system RAM it can use for video ram. So even though you add 8 GB of extra system RAM, you're not going to be able to use more of it for video ram.

As far I know it is possible to set the VRamSize to 2048, which would indicate 2 GB - but in reality only ~1.7 GB would actually be used.

If you want to try that, please change the x60 in your command to x80, and the VRAMSize from 1536 to 2048.

I wouldn't expect that to alleviate the problem with zones of glitches however.

Answer 2

I want add a new update to this. In some Logs around the web, talk about the lost of Sleep, Wake up, And other issues.

This happens after remove ALL AMDKexts without take a little step to think.

The only kext must be removed from the system is AMDRadeonX3000.kext And putted in a folder called: Extensions_Off

After that must run for example: Kext Utility to fix the permissions and the extensions cache.

Another important issue: Try to operate with 2048 Mb shared RAM do not work. My Mac at less, start as connected to an external display. With ALL THE RAM SHARED TO VIDEO. Then all became slow.

Regards