DDS Graphics

What's the difference between dedicated and shared graphics cards ?

Im looking to buy a laptop and because im spending about a £1000 i want every last feature to be perfect im currently deciding between a SONY VGN-FW11M (£999) and a HP DV5-1010 (£799). The sony laptop has 256mb of dedicated graphics and the hp has 512mb of shared graphics so which one is better ?

Public Comments

1. Dedicated is better. When it says shared it also means that the graphics card is intergrated, which sucks for gaming. So the Sony is better. How much memory the graphics card have doesn't matter. That shared memory will be taken from the RAM, meaning the laptop will get slower. 512MB shared memory is MUCH worse than 256MB dedicated. With that dedicated graphics card you will be able to play most games today. But the shared one, you can only run games like Sims 2 and nothing more. Robert doesn't know what he's talking about. Dali is wrong. If it says up to 512MB shared memory, it is an intergrated card. Dedicated will have the option of 800MB and more.
2. I suggest the HP. Shared graphics is the amount of memory is used between your computer and your graphics card. So if it is dedicated. All of the memory is on graphics. I suggest the HP as I personally think they are better and they are well made. 512Mb should be enough, especially since you would have like 1 gig or RAM.
3. go by what Mawe says in this regard........
4. The distinction between dedicated and shared memory is NOT the same as the distinction between dedicated and integrated graphics cards. Your choice shouldn't depend on graphics memory, but rather on the type of card! Memory doesn't mean anything if one graphics card has superior performance to the other. Additionally, many dedicated graphics cards which have shared memory often have dedicated memory as well (this is called HyperMemory for AMD/ATI cards and TurboCache for NVIDIA cards). Dedicated and shared memory are exactly what they sound like: dedicated memory is memory, usually embedded on the graphics card itself, that is used only by the graphics card. Shared memory means that the graphics card uses system memory (RAM), adjusting the amount it borrows based on the kind of work it's doing. Dedicated memory tends to be faster, but that doesn't mean that your overall performance will be faster - especially if one graphics card is simply better than the other, as I've said, or if the card with shared memory has both dedicated and shared memory allocation. To decide between the two, you should evaluate the cards directly by comparing benchmark scores (http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html ), or provide more information about the specific notebooks you're looking to buy (perhaps a link to the item pages). Again, don't decide by comparing graphics memory!