Posted May 17, 2016
GR00T: From your previous statement, it looks like the graphics card has 1GB actual RAM. This is the very fast dedicated graphics RAM that you want. The 4 GB is likely shared (is the card actually a 650M, as suggested?) Shared memory is much, much slower and not desired for gaming. So, the more dedicated memory a graphics card has (memory actually integrated onto the graphics card), then better.
bram1253: I'm pretty sure you are right. I am quite new on all of this and thus I asked the question.
So the GB that's advertised is actually VRAM and not shared RAM?
So shared RAM is RAM that is shared with the GPU and the RAM itself?
Now, when you have a video card integrated into the motherboard, things start getting tricky. The video card may have it's own memory, which no other component can access, that being the dedicated video memory. But it may also have access to overall system memory (the one usually called RAM), which is also used by your OS and programs and everything else.
That memory can also be divided in creative ways. A a chunk of it may be reserved for the system and the video card is unable to touch it. Another chunk of it may be reserved for the video card alone. The remainder could be used for whatever needs it the most at the moment.
The problems are as follows:
a) General memory is much slower than the one used on video cards, so even if you have a ton of it, you will still be doing things slower.
b) If you have a computer with an integrated video card, chances are it's a budget or otherwise a non-gaming computer, so you probably won't have a lot of memory anyway, forcing components to fight over it, again resulting in slow performance.
b) Depending on what software is running at the moment, the availability of memory for tasks such as video can be drastically different.