Effect of RAM on fps.

[gjspear]

How much of an effect does increasing the amount of RAM have on the frames/sec in games? Is it that it wud only speed up the loading times n has very litte effect on the frame rate?

 

[Matthias99]

Generally, yes, although some games use enough memory that they can't fit a whole level in RAM if you only have 256MB (or even 512MB!) MMORPGs in particular (with their huge environments) often work noticeably better with 1GB or more of RAM.

 

[Bovinicus]

It really depends on the game. Some games will benefit noticeabley in terms of loading speed and overall gameplay. BF1942, Sim City 4, and various others all like as much memory as you can give them. I suggest no less than 512MB of memory for any modern system; get 1GB if you can afford it.

 

[jagec]

once you get enough RAM so that all the major files fit in RAM, adding more won't help.

If you're below that point though, it can help quite a bit since you won't have to swap to disk once you start getting to a new area of the map.

 

[gsaldivar]

The amount of VRAM on a video card (128MB vs 64MB) can significantly affect FPS.

The amount of system RAM can also affect FPS, but to a lesser degree.

 

[Regs]

Went from 512 to one GB of ram. It had no difference in FPS. I benchmarked before and after. Levels load faster. The end.

 

[gsaldivar]

Originally posted by: Regs
Went from 512 to one GB of ram. It had no difference in FPS. I benchmarked before and after. Levels load faster. The end.

Try going from 512MB to 256MB. I can guarantee that you'll take a performance hit.

 

[Brian48]

I saw a quite a bit of difference going from 512mb to 1024mb when playing FarCry. It didn't make the game run any faster, but it eliminated all the HDD swapping I was getting.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar

Originally posted by: Regs
Went from 512 to one GB of ram. It had no difference in FPS. I benchmarked before and after. Levels load faster. The end.

Try going from 512MB to 256MB. I can guarantee that you'll take a performance hit.

Yes it likely would. But 512MB is the sweet spot right now for most games. Only if you can afford to , get 1GB of RAM

 

[gsaldivar]

Yes it likely would. But 512MB is the sweet spot right now for most games. Only if you can afford to , get 1GB of RAM

So I guess RAM can have an effect on FPS after all... The end.

 

[Anonemous]

yup more ram = faster loading levels...

can't believe it takes 1-2 minutes to load UT2k4 maps on 512 megs of ram...

 

[Bovinicus]

Originally posted by: Regs
Went from 512 to one GB of ram. It had no difference in FPS. I benchmarked before and after. Levels load faster. The end.

That means nothing. Some games benefit from more memory, some don't. What game(s) did you benchmark?

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar

Yes it likely would. But 512MB is the sweet spot right now for most games. Only if you can afford to , get 1GB of RAM

So I guess RAM can have an effect on FPS after all... The end.

Data does not transfer any faster to the CPU by just by having more ram in a realitive sense. That all depends on the BUS speed and latency of the set up. It just means the hard drive has to work harder. Nothing that would affect FPS directly. Games like Max Payne 2, Far Cry, Battle Field, and a few others load everything into RAM on the start. If it can't then it would have to fetch from the hard drive more info then it would have to when you are using less RAM. This is why 512MB is recommended and not 1 GB, because the performance will not be effected. But on games that recommend a GIG but not require, there might be some slow down. But we have not reached that point yet, except maybe with the exception of Far Cry and BF.

 

[BFG10K]

It'll have no difference in FPS unless you were previously paging during gameplay.

 

[Auric]

It's not a matter of increasing performance but eliminating performance loss which is not necessarily in FPS, but in stuttering from paging operations. Enough RAM is simply enough RAM. Only after that can performance be increased via bandwidth, CPU, VPU, etc. Dig?

 

[howdyduty]

Mo Betta