I'm not sure exactly where you're seeing that reported, but there's different kinds of graphics memory.

Physical graphics cards have memory as part of the card, that's commonly called "on-board" or "Dedicated" graphics memory, and then they can also access system memory for some graphics operations, which is commonly referred to in Windows as "Shared Memory".

For new, modern VMs, VMware's virtual graphics device functions more like an integrated graphics card, in that it primarily uses shared system memory, rather than on-board dedicated memory.

So if you turned up the "Graphics Memory" on the VM in the Workstation UI, the "4MB" value you're seeing is probably the dedicated memory in the virtual PCI-card of our graphics device, which isn't actually used for anything after the guest has finished booting and the graphics driver is loaded.

Whereas the "3000MB" value is probably the amount of system-memory that your guest applications are allowed to use for graphics operations, which is actually the amount of graphics resources the application can create.

So that sounds correct to me.

I'm not sure why you're having Chrome/Photoshop problems though... Can you post a vmware.log file for us to look at?