Is GeForce 9400M with VRAM of 256 adequate for PhotoshopCS4?

Question

My MacBook pro (August 2009) has crashed multiple times, especially in the last few weeks as I was experimenting with study material for Photoshop CS4. The initial files are often 20+ MB. During processing they can become as large as 240 MB. When I completed a file of such size, during the save as process, the system saved but also crashed. Could some of the problem be the relatively small VRAM. My ancient Dell Inspiron 9300 was configured with 1GB of ram, and that was seven years ago. But I'm thinking there's been a lot of tech advancement in that many years. However, multiple crashes are annoying. My file sizes will not get smaller, at least not initially before specific merging and downsizing. In the future, I hope to get a Mac Pro desktop. It is has four graphic cards, each with an indicated Memory of 512. Does that mean approximately 2GB of VRAM? Has new technology really made a smaller VRAM indication that much better than four 1GB configuration?

Answer 1

For my own information, I stepped through the operation to convert a photo into a painting. The efficiency remained at 100% within PhotoshopCS4. The free ram began at 2.93GB, and gradually became: 2.77, 2.76, 2.73, 2.68, 2.69 (up?), 2.71 (up?), 2.65, 2.65, 2.64, 2.69 (up?), and finally ended at 2.67. So, as is, the system and PsCS4 are apparently working OK, without compromising system RAM.
The GPU ram is indicated to have 256 MB. I don't know if that amount is subtracted from the 4GB, or is in addition to. The "About Mac" information lists them separately. My history is with PCs where the RAM configuration is separate from the GPU, especially since a PC card is a separate unit. However, I understand that the MacBook Pro GPU "card" is not a card but is built-into the Mac framework (shades of uni-body PCs). If what you report is the working situation with the MacBook, darn!
As an additional step, I had disconnected a bothersome Western Digital external drive that created a persistent "open pool" error every ten seconds. That would have been a system disfunction, not a GPU issue, but it did seem to mess up and slow down everything.
Based on your input and general attributes of my MacBook Pro, my use of PsCS4 is probably as good as I am going to get for a while. I cannot change the GPU VRAM. The discussions regarding Mac Pro reference only Video output benefits of a GPU and that there are very few options for different cards (and that's in the face of Nvidia's super fast and very large VRAM GPU cards!!).