I believe when someone states dedicated video memory on a laptop as a good thing, they mean RAM that runs at GPU speeds (independent of the system RAM bus speed) and is physically seperate from the system RAM. There is also dedicated RAM in the context of what your saying, 512MB of system RAM, 256MB set in the BIOS for video use, 256MB seen by the OS. One of the new perks in the laptop world is "Dedicated Video RAM" in like 128MB of RAM, soldered right to the mobo, clocked faster than the system RAM to run with the GPU, much the same as in a desktop computer. It's a pricey option, but there none the less.

Beryl, Compiz, Fusion, or whatever they call it, runs fine and fairly stable on my Acer Aspire 9300. Turion 64 x2 with 128MB dedicated video RAM and NVidia 7300 GPU.


On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 20:19 -0500, Luke -Jr wrote: 
On Monday 29 October 2007, Michael Schultheiss wrote:
> Luke -Jr wrote:
> > On Monday 29 October 2007, Michael Schultheiss wrote:
> > > Beryl's old news - it's been merged back with compiz and is now known
> > > as Compiz Fusion.  Ubuntu 7.10 has Compiz Fusion integrated.  It works
> > > fine on my laptop which only has a shared memory Intel i915 video card.
> >
> > "only"? Can't get a whole lot better than that.
>
> Dedicated memory would be a start.

I imagine you can select the amount of RAM dedicated to the video card in your 
BIOS. Is there a reason you want a physical split of memory? I don't think 
any Intel gfx chips allow for that.
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