Microsoft tests Windows 11 feature for GPU memory allocation

Microsoft is testing a new feature for Windows 11 called ‘IntelligentCarveout’ that allows users to manually allocate a specific amount of unified memory to the graphics processing unit (GPU). This feature is designed to assist with memory-intensive tasks, such as running large-scale artificial intelligence models and high-end gaming.

This development coincides with the upcoming release of NVIDIA’s RTX Spark platform, which is expected to support up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X unified memory. In unified memory systems, the CPU and GPU share the same pool of RAM. By using this new setting, users can reserve a larger portion of memory specifically for the GPU, though this reserved memory will be unavailable to other system applications while allocated.

While the exact maximum allocation limits for Windows 11 or NVIDIA’s new platform have not been disclosed, the capability is significant for running AI models with up to 120 billion parameters, which typically require substantial memory resources.