Driving a second display they increased to 260 of 506 MB, and a third display took them to 337 of 698 MB. At default resolution, those rose to 200 of 480 MB used. With an M1 Pro driving just its internal display at low resolution that ‘looks like 1168 x 755’, iStatistica reports around 140 of 379 MB used. However, iStatistica Pro claims to be able to show what it terms “GPU memory used”. At present, those tools can’t make any distinction, so working out what’s being used as video memory isn’t easy. Don’t be surprised if your 8 GB graphics card is fairly constantly using 7 GB.Īs M1 Macs don’t have video memory as such, that being used by the CPU, GPU or both has to be accounted for in system memory as shown by vm_stat and Activity Monitor. Generally, video memory is managed to make full use of what’s available, to get most benefit from GPU acceleration, but to keep sufficient in reserve so as not to run out of free memory. Video memory doesn’t have that option, though, and excess data would have to be copied back to main memory, which results in an even bigger performance hit. In the traditional discrete memory architecture of main and video memory, we’re generally most interested in main memory use, as requiring more memory than is physically available results in the use of virtual memory, with some being paged out to disk, and a dramatic drop in performance. Where Unified Memory becomes more complex is monitoring its use. It’s more common, though, for M1 software to use the shared storage mode, which ensures that both CPU and GPU can access the data. Metal offers different storage modes, which enable software to designate allocations from main memory for the exclusive use of the GPU, which could be useful for data being processed by the GPU alone, perhaps for a compute, render or blit pass. That doesn’t mean that all resources in memory can always be accessed by both CPU and GPU. By unifying memory into a single system resource, such transfers shouldn’t occur, significantly reducing overhead. The main disadvantage of having separate main and video memory is that most of what ends up on the display will have to be moved from main to video memory, and when the GPU is used for non-graphics work such as intensive computation, data has to pass both ways. Some tools, such as iStat Menus and iStatistica Pro, provide usage figures for both types. Previously, we’ve been used to our Macs having two separate memories, main memory accessed by the CPU, and what’s often referred to as VRAM in the graphics card, which is exclusively for the GPU. That simply means that there’s a single system memory which is accessed by the CPU, GPU and other parts of the M1 chip such as its Neural Engine. Sensei includes an SSD Trim Enabler and fan control is slated to be arriving by March.One of the headline features of Apple Silicon Macs is their use of Unified Memory. You also get fine-grained details like which vendor produced your Mac, components like the battery, and much more. We’ve been able to check out Sensei and it and offers a gorgeous UI with lots of great functionality for monitoring and adjusting a Mac’s software and hardware performance. It includes features for cleaning your disk, uninstalling apps, analyzing battery and disk health, monitoring CPU/GPU/RAM statistics, optimizing boot startup speeds and much more. Sensei is an app that spans both software and hardware, including many more features than other apps in the Mac optimization category. Here’s how developer Oskar Groth describes the new Mac app: Sensei features a beautiful user interface with rich icons and lots of functionality like an SSD Trim Enabler, battery health, storage management, performance dashboard, and much more. A new app called Sensei has arrived today for Mac that lets you monitor and tweak performance to get the most out of your machine.
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