Dedicated/integrated/shared/onboard/discrete/mobility

Cosmic37

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Jan 2, 2011
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Eh, what does it all mean? Can someone explain or point to an explanation of all these different terms used to describe laptop graphics cards... "dedicated"/"integrated"/"shared"/"onboard"/"discrete"/"mobility"?
I was thinking that there would be two types - one with "dedicated" graphics memory on the graphics card and another which "shared" the rest of the computers memory?
I was supposing that in general the dedicated graphics memory would be faster and better because there would be no faffing around managing the sharing of the memory with other processes although on the other hand a computer has to do that kind of thing all the time and after all it only needs clean memory allocation and addressing in order to do this so actually I really don't know why dedicated graphics memory would be superior or not...
Luckily some of you do know and you are going to actually answer my message and enlighten me right? :love:
 

Cosmic37

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Jan 2, 2011
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You cruel people not answering this question. Why are you spurning my posts? What have I done to deserve this? Is Tom's Hardware forum ignorant and unable to supply answers at my beck and call? Harrumph.
 

Cosmic37

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Jan 2, 2011
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Can anyone else supply a more useful answer, something maybe informative and helpful? I'm sure I am not the only one out there who is interested!