Educate me regarding dedicated memory!

[Yoh]

Im trying to justify that the new MPB 13'' can handle Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 later on... although it has the integrated 320M GPU

Lets say that the old 15'' has the 9400M with 256MB right? and benchmark for 320M comes out to be as good or better than that one... will I still be able to run games on the new 13'' as well or better even if it doesnt have dedicated memory but is a better card?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Yes.

 

[Yoh]

um.... -_-

why? it doesnt have any dedicated memory which people want SO MUCH... how can it still be good?

 

[Padraic]

Here check this link out... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_adapter#GPU_forms

If Blizzard has released the requirements for Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 do a quick comparison, it should tell you.

The biggest draw back to integrated GPU is they pull from your system RAM rather than having its own dedicated RAM. So if you have 2gb of system memory, and your GPU is integrated and pulls 256mb, then you have 256mb less of system memory. Plus factor in that system memory is slower than the RAM included on a dedicated GPU...

 

[BlueRevolution]

um.... -_-

why? it doesnt have any dedicated memory which people want SO MUCH... how can it still be good?

Faster benchmarks = faster graphics card. There's no "but the benchmarks don't count because it's integrated". Now, because it shares memory with your system, you'll need a memory upgrade sooner, but your performance on applications that get along just fine on computers with x - 256 MB of memory won't be affected.