So today in derping around with AI and such, I noticed that I had to manually set my server to "on" in order to use it. It said that 4 cores and 8GB of RAM is recommended, which my PC clearly meets. I have a A10-7850K which has definitely has 4 CPU cores but they are organized into 2 compute units (kind of like with FX CPUs, but not the same) which has me wondering if this is confusing PA. I also have 8GB of functioning RAM and a x64 OS (I checked to make sure my RAM was registered by Windows 7, and it was). Yes I understand that this isn't a particularly overwhelming CPU but it is still should be capable of reasonable offline play (and it had no issues keeping up with 2 Absurd AI on Pacific).
If the graphics card takes a sizable chunk of your RAM, then that confuses PA. You should be able to see in your DxDiag how much the graphics card steals.
I don't know how much RAM the GPU eats on the main menu, but I'm going to say that PA looks for 8GB of system memory free, or maybe 8 minus the OS usage. Anyways, that pretty much explains it.
They did account for it somewhat. I think they look for 8GB - 256MB or something similar. I don't know the exact number. I only know that when the first implemented the offline server, it looked for strictly 8GB and afterwards they lowered it. If you make a DxDiag.txt, it should say in the graphics card section how much dedicated RAM your card has and how much shared it uses. For example: Code: Dedicated Memory: 1010 MB Shared Memory: 3839 MB The shared part is what you card *can* steal from your main OS. The example above has plenty of dedicated memory though, but if the dedicated memory is low or even zero, your card will steal. Also at the top of the file there is some other report about available memory to the OS. For example Code: Memory: 8192MB RAM Available OS Memory: 8190MB RAM I'm not sure where PA exactly gets the available memory number from though.
I doubt that PA just check for free RAM so current usage doesn't really matter. It's likely use some way to determine total RAM available so as @DeathByDenim noticed RAM that reserved by GPU is affect RAM that PA think it's can use. If you can see that there is a lot RAM reserved according to DxDiag then you may try to check your UEFI/BIOS and likely there is option to set amount of memory that "reserved" for GPU (and can't be used by OS). So you can set it to dynamic allocation (zero reserved RAM) and it's should help likely.
Which is indeed how it is set. I didn't look for reserved memory on my dxdiag, but it only showed 200mb used for the desktop (I expect it's closer to 512mb for the PA menus) but I figured dynamic is better since it's not primarily gaming.
You need to check it yourself or upload DxDiag.txt there as it's possible that you have some other device that reserve RAM. I seen many Windows device drivers that reserve a lot more RAM than they ever need (even 300MB-2GB RAM may be reserved without a reason). In case you see something like that you can check that memory is hardware reserved using "Resource Monitor" tool:
I would really recommend investigate what reserve it as if your BIOS settings for integrated graphics set as you said then it's likely some other device doing this. Normally there shouldn't be more than like 50MB of hardware reserved memory as integrated graphics can live with shared memory just fine.
I checked--UMA buffer size is set to Auto even though windows has set aside 1070MB for hardware. Not sure how to check exactly how much memory is allocated to what specific hardware. In device manager I can see what is using what addresses in the memory, which is a neat feature. Edit: GPU-Z says 1024MB of memory for the GPU, which is probably what the hardware reserved is. it's probably either how the motherboard handles the demand or how windows handles it.
As far as I see you can find out what exactly amount of memory is reserved for these addresses, but you'll need to convert it somehow. Before there clearly was some tools to find out how much memory certain things using on Windows, but as always for Windows it's extremely hard to find out any useful information on it. Anyway if it's iGPU doing this then you may try to update BIOS as it's likely lying to you that it's not reserve anything. Or this may be AMD drivers specific because my Intel graphics never did anything like that, but I never had and AMD iGPU.
