^ Yeah this has always been the problem with 'premium' priced APU's. $360 is almost 3-4x the price that the 3200G / 3400G were and makes little sense for budget gamers vs buying a cheaper CPU + GPU unless they really want to pay through the nose for a niche slim ITX build in a case like the Inwin Chopin. I bought an i5-10400F for ÂŁ124 and GTX1660 for ÂŁ159 (total ÂŁ283) with 4-5x the performance and certainly wouldn't spend anywhere near the same money on "between GT1030 and GTX1050" class performance (which is what this APU has) vs simply buying a cheap 1050Ti / 1060 on Ebay. MOAR CORES doesn't do a thing for low-end gaming with such strong GPU bottlenecks, you just sit there with impressively low CPU usage to match the impressively low frame-rates (20-50fps at 1080p in most games here). And budget gamers tend to not have 3800 speed RAM lying around so either more money on top for a possible RAM upgrade (or lower performance for typical budget 2666-3200 modules) needs to be factored too. What would have been interesting is if AMD had released a cheap 5300G for the same price as the 3200G (ÂŁ79 at one point) during the worst of the GPU shortages, but they're refusing to sell that even now (outside of OEM), so even after 2-3 years there's still no real "upgrade" to the 3200G / 3400G at anywhere near the same price point. People who can't afford ÂŁ80 CPU's + ÂŁ150 GPU's tend to not buy +ÂŁ300 APU's with half the performance...
Yes that's exactly how it works. The iGPU "memory size" is just the "window" the game sees. If a game needs 2GB VRAM but you have it set to 512MB VRAM, then it will use +1.5GB more from regular RAM instead of VRAM (which for iGPU's is the same thing). ie, if a game uses say 2GB VRAM and 3GB system RAM, and you lower APU "VRAM" size from 2GB to 512MB in the BIOS, it will appear to use only 512MB VRAM in MSI Afterburner, etc, but the 3GB system RAM will increase to 4.5GB RAM as more system RAM gets used as an "overflow".