1GB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 4650 questions

My old laptop use to have a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics card. I am going to buy a new laptop and it has a 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 4650 graphics card. I need to know if its a better graphics card for movies games etc. The NVIDIA was a good card because it was really good with playing games like combat arms. SO I wanted to know if the ATI is better and does 1gb mean it uses one gb of ram?

 

yes, it is slightly better than the 9600m gt. the 1gb means that it comes with 1gb video memory onboard. hope this helps.

 

It is a very good card, these cards are on top of the mainstream level.

 

That statement is contradictory. Very good and mainstream don't really go hand in hand.

The 4650 is a high, mid-grade card. It should perform slightly better than the 9600m, However, it still only has 128 bit bus, which means it will only utilize 128mb of the video ram. Bus size is exponentially more important than the amount of video ram. In this case the increase from 512mb to 1gb of Vram will only be useful if you're playing at a higher resolution size (1900x1200 for example.) and you won't see much performance boost (due to increased vram) in games.

 

not true. although this might be the case when video cards still use ddr memory.
have you seen the benchmarks of 128mb macbook pros vs 256mb macbook pros, both using 8600m gt which is slower than hd4650? the 256 version shows a clear lead in almost every game they test.
any ways, it's a good card, not because it has 1gb memory, but because oc the 320 unified shaders.

 

The bus width alone doesn't mean anything. People get it over your heads that the end result is the important thing, not how many or how much of something it has individually.

The bus width affects the memory bandwidth of the card. The memory type and speed affect this as well. This means we need a balance of all three to achieve high memory bandwidth. The memory bandwidth is the important detail, not if its 128bits only. And no, the bus width does not determine how much memory you use, again, this is the memory bandwidth. This is the reason why 128bit cards with high memory speeds and type can outperform 256bit cards with lesser memory speeds.

So just check your bus size, memory type and memory speed. That will give you and idea of the memory performance you will have with games, as well as an idea of the resolution you can play at without memory bandwidth being the problem.

This also applies to other things like shaders, where a high shader processor card might perform similarly as a card with less shaders but much higher clockspeed etc.

The important thing is the end result.