Mali 400 and memory on cheap tablets

So I'm using an A13 tablet with mali 400 GPU and 512MB of ram. 800x480

Some EGL apps are having texture problems where the screen will go black. Benchmarks that run get low FPS too like 5-15. Apps are clearly running with black screen too and in some benchmarks it goes in/out.

I see error messages like:
<4>[ 4516.010000] Mali: Memory allocate failed, could not allocate size 256 kB.
<4>[ 4516.020000] Mali: Out of memory. Mali memory allocated: 65408 kB Configure 65535 kb

and on igo primo in GL mode
E/navngo ( 809): 17:54:13 MapView:eek:penGL_PrepareBuffers: should not be called
E/navngo ( 809): 17:54:13 iGO:eek:penGL surface_gles.cpp: Framework_OpenGL_PrepareBuffers not ready
W/navngo ( 809): 17:54:13 iGO:eek:penGL videomemorymanager.cpp: OpenGL: Cannot create 1024*1024 texture -- smaller too like 64x64

Is there any tweak or work around for this? GPU broken/sucks? The driver should be using system memory after running out of "vram" and I have 200MB free. I have gles libraries on the device and the OS is set to run gpu accelerated with only 0 1 mali in egl cfg plus build.prop set to GPU rendering.