Hi everyone! I am about to buy new laptop "Toshiba P300-172" 17"in It has a ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 512Mb dedicated graphics with 1279Mb Hypermemory. My Question is, what is HyperMemory? And is this graphics good to play games, but not on full...As it's not a gaming laptop. The laptop specs are: Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 Processor (2.5GHz). 4Gb RAM . 640Gb Hard Drive. DVD Supermulti Dual Layer. ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 512Mb dedicated graphics with 1279Mb Hypermemory. Will that be good for new games, but ofcourse not on high? And what do you think of laptop overall? Thanks forward. P.S: I've looked at another laptop (Samsung R710 17ins) and question came up, will this be better than the Toshiba i've looked up to play games? Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor. 4Gb (2X2Gb) RAM. 320Gb SATA hard drive. 17ins WXGA+ superbright gloss display. Blu-ray combo drive (play Blu-ray + write DVD). Dedicated Nvidia GeForce. 9300M GS 512Mb graphics.
That HD3650 will be roughly twice as fast as the 9300M for gaming. It won't be entirely brilliant, but it ought to hold up fairly well for most games. Hypermemory is simply a system which allows the video card to borrow from system RAM if it needs more texture memory than it has on-board. In theory, this means the card can be built more cheaply but still hold sizable textures. In practice, thanks to the huge speed gap between main RAM and video RAM, it doesn't work particularly well. A card with, for example, 64mb on-board and 512mb through hypermemory will be nowhere near as effective as a card with 512mb on-board, but I suspect it'll still be better than a card with only 64mb on-board and no hypermemory. I doubt you'll be able to escape the technology at this pricepoint, but since you're looking at a card with a full 512mb on-board already, I wouldn't expect any issues. You'll want to be aware, though, that 768mb of your system RAM is going to go missing whether you like it or not - memory that's mapped to hypermemory can't be used elsewhere, and I'm fairly sure the technology can't be turned off.
Thanks for explanation. Well if it has 4GB RAM then I am not so worried about 1gb of ram going to video. I made my choice then, I will soon get the Toshiba P.S - What setting will I be able to play games like COD or Farcry maybe? Just low or maybe medium?
I really don't know what you should expect, exactly. I was unable to find any good benchmarks at all. I used 3DMark scores to compare the two cards you had asked about, but that doesn't really give you much information about in-game performance. I pulled the data from here, so you could take a look at those raw scores and try to make comparisons to cards for which you can actually find benchmark information. Don't expect too much, but most modern games can do surprisingly well on low-end hardware. My laptop has a lowly, ancient Radeon 9600, and can still manage to play Portal on low settings.
