4 G of memory useless for gaming?

[HansSvetty]

We have a friendly disagreement in my LAN . I say two gigs of good RAM is plenty for FEAR, etc. No benefit to having more.

What is the truth here?

 

[djnsmith7]

I say you can never have "too much" RAM. I plan on upgrading to 4 GB in the near future...

My favorite analogy here is, it's like HP in a sports car...Enough said...

 

[mphartzheim]

Originally posted by: djnsmith7
I say you can never have "too much" RAM. I plan on upgrading to 4 GB in the near future...

My favorite analogy here is, it's like HP in a sports car...Enough said...

And what about sticking a Porsche engine in a Ford Pinto?

Sure, you can never have "too much" RAM, but there is a point at where other bottlenecks prevent it from adding any additional benefit.

I doubt you'll ever settle that argument.

 

[jimbob200521]

I'd say that 2gb right now is about the perfect amount. 4gb is good for video editing etc, but for gaming, 2gb is the sweet spot.

 

[Mavrick007]

Unless you think you're going to keep your machine for a long while, buying regular DDR ram will have a hard upgrade path cause DDR2 will be pushing out in awhile on AMD platforms. If you think you'll do well with the 4Gigs of DDR, then go for it, but if you can handle 2Gigs for awhile, then you might want to wait a bit longer.

 

[Broly]

read the sig and weep

I'm a stickler for ram, WOW gets ownt by my PC, Beat down to the ground with 3 simultaneous windows running all in IF

rAM ftw

 

[Finns14]

I would for all the 4G user who game to record the acutal volume of ram that is used I am sure it never even exceeds 2G if you use photoshop maybe it will break the 2G threshold and if you video encode it could use it but for gaming its a waste of money which could be better spent on other components that would actually gain you a noticable difference

 

[Bobthelost]

RAM does nothing for your computer if the program doesn't use it.

No game i have ever heard of uses more than 2gb. So by adding more RAM all you will do is slow down the stuff you are using to 2T.

4gb is worse than 2gb for A64, and probably for P4 too, but i'm not sure how they handle 4 sticks.

More RAM is not always better, only people who don't know how RAM works would think that.

 

[stevty2889]

Windows won't allocate more than 2gb of ram to a single program, therefore having 4gig of ram is not going to improve gaming, unless you had some other very ram hungry program running in the background at the same time.

 

[Tostada]

Like others have said, unless you're doing hardcore Photoshop work or massive multitasking, 4GB is slower than 2GB. Look at your motherboard manual and you'll see that your ram drops down to DDR333 when you have 4GB installed. So having 4GB will slow you down and go unused, since a process can't use more than 2GB. Sure, there could be a multithreaded app that uses more than 2GB, but good luck finding an actual example where there is a benefit from 4GB.

I mean, there are definitely situations where 4GB would be beneficial, but you said "my LAN," so I'm assuming you're talking about gaming situations where you're mostly worried about FPS and level load times. You're not going to get any help from 4GB.

 

[gsellis]

Yep, W32 is not going to allocate more than 2GB for an app. As for video editing, even we don't really benefit from more than 2GB. NLEs were designed to run on sparse systems and still run that way. Yes, even with HDV. I suspect they will use 64bit addressing when it becomes commonplace, but for the moment, 1GB is usually enough with 2 being 'full'.

 

[Tostada]

I'm currently running a database server pegged at 60% CPU usage on each core, 10 apps, and Firefox is using 270MB, and I still have half my 2GB going unused...

 

[Bobthelost]

I just checked, on a machine that's been running BF2 for many hours of hardcore fun, and just finished ripping and backing up one of my new DVDs the RAM usage has never exceeded 1.1gb.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Originally posted by: HansSvetty
We have a friendly disagreement in my LAN . I say two gigs of good RAM is plenty for FEAR, etc. No benefit to having more.

What is the truth here?

If you are strickly talking about gaming, then I'd say that, yes, 4GB is overkill on a 32-bit OS and today's modern games. I suppose it can be argued that additional RAM comes into play if you are doing some intensive multi-tasking in the background (video encoding, etc.) But for straight gaming, 4GB will see little-to-no benefit over 2GB, and possibly decrease performance.

 

[Stumben2]

2 Gig of ram itself is borderline overkill for a game like FEAR. I think RAM will play a much bigger factor in a game like MW: Oblivion. For FEAR, 1 gig ram and a high end V-card your set.

4 gig, beyond overkill. Not to say I wouldnt mind having it

 

[Broly]

I only got 4gb since I run x64 and it works very very Nicely..

 

[Zoinks]

Buy 2 more GB from someplace you can return it. Test your favorite game before and after. (http://www.fraps.com/) See if its worth it.

My guess is it makes no difference. More memory will make your computer MUCH faster if and only if you don't have enough.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: Zoinks
Buy 2 more GB from someplace you can return it. Test your favorite game before and after. (http://www.fraps.com/) See if its worth it.

My guess is it makes no difference. More memory will make your computer MUCH faster if and only if you don't have enough.

If a game doesn't use up 2gb then adding another 2 will do nothing at all.

 

[bob4432]

for all of you and your lan buddies, play the game, then hit ctrl-alt-del and see what the peak commit charge was. if it is over 2GB, then more ram will help you as the game may or may not use 2GB all by itself, but maybe there are 200 background programs running.

 

[Bobthelost]

So, brolly was just telling us what game uses more than 2gb of RAM...

*waits*

 

[Broly]

I didn't say any game uses more than 2gb of ram you dummy. i said it's useful for running multiple instances of games.

I have 3 wow windows open in Ironforge at the same time with each game consuming about 750 000 virtual memory, what's that over a little over 2 gigs?

I can even throw on farcry and I still own.

 

[Bobthelost]

Lovely, so no game uses more than 2gb, and there is no point to running XP64 for gaming either.

So in other words if you're not going to start doing silly amounts of mutlitasking you don't need more than 2gb.

 

[Broly]

You're a tool if you think x64 is useless for gaming.

Half life 2's source engine was completely recoded for the x64.

Farcry was completely recoded for x64 and the difference between the 32 versions in x64 and the 64 bit versions in x64 are astounding, but again you wouldn't know you forum troll

 

[Bobthelost]

Really, so you have some benchmarks or writeups for that showing the improvements?

E2A: You have of course neglected to refer to my comments about more than 2gb being useless when you're not running silly amounts of other programs. Still no commnent?

 

[hardcandy2]

RAM Allocation with Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional
To access more than 4 GB of memory the Windows client OS (Windows XP Professional) needs to be upgraded to the future 64-bit
version of Windows. In addition, while the current 32-bit client versions of Windows for x86-based computers can access 4 GB of virtual
memory with today?s large disk drives, less than 4 GB of physical RAM can be accessed. Below we describe how physical addresses are
allocated with Windows and how RAM is made available for the user.
Designed as a 32-bit OS, Windows XP Professional supports an address range from 0 to 4096 MB or 4 GB. This allows Windows to
allocate 4 GB of virtual memory addresses and also up to 4 GB of physical memory addresses. Physical memory addresses are allocated
to manage both the computer?s resources (machine hardware) and RAM: (See figure below)
RAM starts from address 0. The Windows OS allocates RAM from 0 up to the bottom of the PCI memory addresses mentioned above.
Because up to a gigabyte of the PCI memory addresses can be allocated for the above items, the available addresses for RAM may be
limited to about 3.1 GB. Thus if a computer is loaded with 4 GB of RAM or more, some of the RAM will not be available. (The OS
still has access to 4 GB of virtual memory via disk paging.)
http://www.hp.com/workstations/white_papers/docs/RAM_alloc_WindowsXP.pdf

So basically, WinXP can use 4 GB of memory but some of that has to be virtual memory, it will not use all of 4GB physical RAM, maybe go with 3 GB?