You're only counting the application you're looking at though. Multiply that by all the applications running, and pretty soon 512MB of VRAM is looking kinda ski

You're only counting the application you're looking at though. Multiply that by all the applications running, and pretty soon 512MB of VRAM is looking kinda skimpy. And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a huge amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.