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I want to use iLife, but I only have 256 MB VRAM... How can I fake the amount so that it thinks I have more.

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VRAM is the quantity of RAM on your video card, if you were to trick something into thinking you had more, stuff would break horribly. (As it expects more resources than it has) – Phoshi Sep 14 '09 at 15:11
This reminds me of the old WishIWere application for old 68k based macs to make it think you had a higher processor. – Troggy♦ Sep 14 '09 at 16:07
Does it refuse to install all parts of iLife? Some people have managed to patch the installer to avoid the test. Like for iMovie on a G4, see macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090130074400511 – Arjan Sep 14 '09 at 16:28
It doesnt refuse to install any part, but after installation i cant see the slide show in KEYNOTE, due to less VRAM – dhasu Sep 15 '09 at 4:19
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You can only increase it by really upgrading your video card.

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up vote 3 down vote

You can't

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up vote 2 down vote

You can't "increase" the amount of VRAM that is reported but it is possible to avoid the check in the program however you do so at your peril as it may or may not cause issues.

That said iLife '09 (and '08 for that matter) will run on computers with less than 256MB of VRAM (eg. the MacBook Pro I'm running now has 128MB of VRAM) and it doesn't even check for video memory.

Of note, if you're getting an alert that you have 0MB of VRAM it either means the computer was started up without a monitor attached (applies to Mac minis and Mac Pros mostly - Xserves are not affected by this) or that your video card is not being properly recognized and you're running off some generic drivers that shouldn't be used.

If you are meaning RAM (just computer memory versus memory on the video card), it's not worth the effort to fake having more RAM. RAM is cheap and attempting to run Mac OS X on 256MB of memory is painful. There's a reason that Leopard and Snow Leopard require 512MB of memory.

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