1 GB DDR5 dedicated, up to 4.98 GB total graphics memory? Is it good?

I'm purchasing a new laptop, ( http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product...spx?path=f9c87ba018399cfe9c15ed1cb4306ee2en02) reading through the specs, i came across this: "1 GB DDR5 dedicated, up to 4.98 GB total" which is referring to graphics memory I would assume, but this seems high compared to other laptops/computers that I've been looking at. It would be nice if someone were to help me understand this.

Same laptop, wrong link: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/e...html?jumpid=reg_r1002_caenc-001&lang=en&cc=ca

 

The amount of discrete (dedicated) memory in the GPU is generally not representative of performance. The amount of memory that can be utilized from system memory is useless for discrete GPUs. Rather, you have to look up the model and the type of GPU memory used (in this case, GDDR5, which is better than GDDR3, DDR3, and DDR2). I'm not sure about the AMD Radeon HD 6755G2, but a quick Google search will yield you good comparisons.

 

Thanks! that solved my problem. I've already looked up all of the other specs, it has 2 graphics cards crossfired on the motherboard, I just wasn't familiar with how graphics memory affected this.

 

Exactly.

The AMD Radeon HD 6755G2 is AMD's name for the combination of the A8 CPU's integrated GPU (Radeon HD 6620G) and an additional AMD discrete GPU ( Radeon HD 6750M). Overall, it's a pretty good GPU combination that'll be able to play all modern games (most at medium-high settings, I believe), although I believe there were some driver support issues with AMD's dual GPU implementation. Others with more experience with this setup can probably shed more light here.

 

Yes, I have the 6755G2. It is a mixed bag. The crossfire can cause microstuttering if they haven't released decent drivers or crossfire profiles for newer games. It seems to be lessened with DirectX 11 though. I can get 25-40fps at 1080p settings at low/med on Battlefield 3 using Crossfire.

You can also choose to switch between the GPU integrated on the CPU die (integrated GPU or iGPU) and the dedicated GPU (6750m) if needed. Be warned that OpenGL for whatever reason, only will utilize the integrated GPU.

 

GPU memory affects performance when you look at it's type (GDDR5 being the best on the market at the moment)... the actual amount of memory on the gpu is much less relevant.
Mid-range mobile discrete gpu's don't really need over 768MB (and even that can be seen as 'high' - except if you are using CUDA tech on Nvidia cards - in this case 1GB might be recommended).
High-end mobile discrete gpu's don't need over 1.5GB.

For games, no gpu will come close to using it's full memory capacity.

Laptop manufacturers will often tout high memory capacity in gpu's as something that influences performance - this is nothing more than an attempt to make you spend more by gaining nothing.

Integrated gpu's are often touted that they can go up to 2 or 3GB... but that's using the system ram which is slower than the one on discrete gpu's.
In practical use, they will rarely exceed 256MB.

Long story short: pay attention to the memory type and bus bandwidth on the gpu rather than the amount of memory it has.

 

A good analogy that works when talking about GPU memory is that you can think of the GPU having 2 components, a processor and RAM. When one is talking about the CPU oriented tasks such as encoding, two things are brought to question, the CPU of the computer and the amount of RAM it has. Even if it has a lot of RAM, the performance is determined by the CPU, as the RAM is just for data storage. The same analogy can be transferred to the GPU, with the actual chip being the video processor and the VRAM being just like "video" data storage space.