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4gb enough for gaming?

I never realized it until I used my 4 year old laptop, but 4GB is now the least you want for Windows 7 plus gaming. Typically, a game will be at least 2GB and Windows will use 1.5GB easily as well.
 
KentState said:
I never realized it until I used my 4 year old laptop, but 4GB is now the least you want for Windows 7 plus gaming. Typically, a game will be at least 2GB and Windows will use 1.5GB easily as well.
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Game can be at most 2GB (if it is not 64-bit executable), and Widows itself will have less than 1.5GB. Running programs can eat a lot, but still 4GB is enough at the moment.

There is lo lot of specific software that uses lots of RAM, and multi core optimized, but OP has not mentioned any.
 
Just checked and my laptop has around 3GB of memory used and my desktop has 3.5GB before any games. Seems even with minimal programs running, I would prefer 8 just to have the overhead.
 
No. It's an illusion. Windows 7 reserves most of your RAM whether it needs it or not; for caching/page files/Lord knows what. It doesn't actually need that much RAM though, it just claims a ton of RAM for itself if no other memory-hungry programs are running. People have been playing games like Crysis on 2GB RAM systems for years. It may hiccup slightly more often so framerate minimums may be lower, but average fps is pretty similar and is definitely playable... and it's CRYSIS we're talking about here, not some PopCap game. I already talked about this in a recent thread. Here is one example of how little difference 2GB vs 4GB RAM makes in many games: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/709/3/

Bottom line: 2GB is enough for most modern games, 3GB is better to avoid the 8% dip in games like Crysis (or, presumably, Metro2033, BF3, etc.). There is no pressing need for more than 4GB though unless you leave a LOT of programs running in the background while gaming or something.
 
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I would consider 8GB as with 4GB I would experience some hard drive thrashing after shutting down a game. This would cause my system to slow way down and take longer to open up programs.

After I upgraded I have none of these problems.
 
TakeNoPrisoners said:
I would consider 8GB as with 4GB I would experience some hard drive thrashing after shutting down a game. This would cause my system to slow way down and take longer to open up programs.

After I upgraded I have none of these problems.
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I have 12GB of RAM and 7200rpm workstation and I still have these problems. The culprit is slow hard drive. If you had a SSD, you wouldn't notice a thing even with 4GB.
 
Does anyone else remember upgrading to 8mb of ram back in the day for their 386dx (or sx)? How times have changed!

As others have said, it really depends where your system is bottlenecking at, but honestly, at $25 per 4gb of RAM, I don't see how you can go wrong
 
iloveATech said:
Does anyone else remember upgrading to 8mb of ram back in the day for their 386dx (or sx)? How times have changed!

As others have said, it really depends where your system is bottlenecking at, but honestly, at $25 per 4gb of RAM, I don't see how you can go wrong
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Yes, I remember those days. Trying to convince my parents to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading RAM and hard drives was difficult when there wasn't a ton to go around. I got really good at reinstalling things as I only had 25MB of HD to play with.
 
4GB will do the job, but 6-8GB is a little safer if you play certain memory-hungry games or multi-task. Memory is really cheap.
 
4GB is the least you want to OS operation... I can't properly browse the web on my 2GB laptop without running out..

all hail 8GB of ram.
 
4Gb for a strictly gaming machine that you aren't trying to do a whole bunch of other stuff on is actually just fine. I certainly wouldn't go lower, but having 4Gb is definitely enough 🙂.

If you are doing a lot of stuff, 4Gb might not be enough (and having 8Gb is just so damn cheap atm).
 
taltamir said:
4GB is the least you want to OS operation... I can't properly browse the web on my 2GB laptop without running out..

all hail 8GB of ram.
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try Opera... it's been gentle with RAM when it needs to, but maxes til 4GB (32bit program limit on windows) when I open 300 tabs, and crashes 😀
 
I can still live with 2 gigs of RAM on my laptop. Latest Opera / FF 12 have become much better with memory management. Problem with 8 gigs... is that you have to use 64-bit OS. For compatibility issues mostly, I refrain from going 64-bit yet.

Anybody use ASRock's XFast RAM?
 
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64-bit games are rare and 32-bit processes on Windows are limited to 2G of VM unless the developers went far enough to mark them LargeAddressAware so they can use up to 4G of VM. The worst you would have to do with 4G is close out of anything you have running before starting up your game. Even that shouldn't really be necessary, but might help with load times and such as it will avoid some additional paging.

taltamir said:
4GB is the least you want to OS operation... I can't properly browse the web on my 2GB laptop without running out..

all hail 8GB of ram.
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No offense, but I'd say you're doing something wrong then. My old work laptop has 2G in it and it worked fine with both XP and Win7 doing everything I need, including browsing and running a memory hungry ticketing, invoicing, PM, etc app that we use. It did a fair amount of paging, but performance was fine except for when that one app would go nuts.

Not that I'm not saying he shouldn't get 8G or more, with memory prices where they are one should always load up with as much as they can justify the cost.

Magic Carpet said:
Problem with 8 gigs... is that you have to use 64-bit OS. For compatibility issues mostly, I refrain from going 64-bit yet.
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Except that isn't a problem. I've been using 64-bit Win7 for like 3 years now and can't ever remember running into an app that wouldn't run.
 
4GB is not fine, get 8GB.

The longer your pc is on, the more ram it uses, so you don't want to reboot, just to get proper ingame performance, and people seems to forgot that your windows is already slowing down if you use more then 85% of the ram available, which is around 3.5GB = not enough, so no when you have 4GB it means that you got 3.5 effective, when you take all into account, 4GB is not enough and your going onto the edge.
 
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8 gigs is the correct answer. I generally have more than just the OS and a game running. Going from 4 to 8 made a big difference in wow when I upgraded.
 
Psyside said:
4GB is not fine, get 8GB.

The longer your pc is on, the more ram it uses, so you don't want to reboot, just to get proper ingame performance, and people seems to forgot that your windows is already slowing down if you use more then 85% of the ram available, which is around 3.5GB = not enough, so no when you have 4GB it means that you got 3.5 effective, when you take all into account, 4GB is not enough and your going onto the edge.
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Wow, none of that makes any sense whatsoever...
 
Ok cool, try to keep your pc on, like whole day, and then start some demanding game and watch what happens, if you use x64 OS that is.

Very small part of the users, reboot their pc every day, so the memory gets full quite a bit, and when memory is so cheap, why to be limited if you already got good high end pc, like OP has?
 
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Psyside said:
Ok cool, try to keep your pc on, like whole day, and then start some demanding game and watch what happens, if you use x64 OS that is.

Very small part of the users, reboot their pc every day, so the memory gets full quite a bit, and when memory is so cheap, why to be limited if you already got good high end pc, like OP has?
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I leave my Win7 VM running for weeks at a time and the performance stays the same. If that's not the case for you then you have some bad piece of software causing your issues, not Windows itself.
 
You are both right. 2GB is enough to scrape by in most games if you don't have anything else open. If you leave other programs running in the background a lot, then you may need more RAM, at least 4GB and preferably more.

I already linked to: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/709/3/ and so far nobody has linked to anything refuting that.

Like Nothinman pointed out, most games are written for 32-bit systems. And the guy saying his 2GB laptop suffered may want to switch to a more efficient browser without memory leaks. (Also, some other portion of the laptop may be more to blame.)

But Psyside sort of has a point. Some programs have memory leaks so it's good to flush them away once in a while. I remember older versions of Firefox were very leaky and can attest to having to flush them. However, you do not need to reboot in order to flush your memory--just close all your programs and re-open them. I eventually got tired of closing my browsers and reopening them, so I got 8GB RAM. Later on, Firefox fixed its memory leakage issues, so I guess I got the extra RAM for nothing. Oh well.

At current memory prices, I would just get 8GB and be done with it. But going down to even 2GB is still adequate (slightly lower minimum framerates in most games; and lower than that in heavy games) if you don't have too many memory-hogging programs running at the same time.
 
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