How much ram is enough for gaming?

[kevinbaron]

I'm building a new system and was curious if 2 gigs would be enough. I might be willing to get 4 gigs just to be safe. But is that to much? I know games now are useing a gig or more. But is 4 gigs overkill? It will cost me money, so i dont wanna waste cash on 4 gigs if i wont need it.

 

[The_Prophecy]

Get 2GB for now. 4GB is overkill and will actually hurt performance. get 2 x 1GB sticks right now, and then when Vista comes out, get another 2 x 1GB set (but ONLY if you actually get Vista).

 

[FatFunkey]

uh 1 gig is fine with XP 2 gig will be fine for vista

this is for gamming rmeber toms own report on the ram..diffrence between 1gig to 2gigs is a whopping 1-2fps...def worth...150dollars for the extra gig...while dif 512-1gig is large anywere from 15-25fps+

 

[chuckshissle]

Depends on what games do you play and what settings. If you're into Counter Strike type games where there's little ram resource needed to run then at 1Gb should be enough even at running on high settings and resolution. Games like BF2, FEAR , Oblivion , Quake 4 , Prey and alike which are more resource hog can only be run smoothly at high rez and settings using 2Gb of ramage. At higher applications on gaming quantity is better than quality when it comes to ram selection.

 

[The_Prophecy]

uh 1 gig is fine with XP 2 gig will be fine for vista

this is for gamming rmeber toms own report on the ram..diffrence between 1gig to 2gigs is a whopping 1-2fps...def worth...150dollars for the extra gig...while dif 512-1gig is large anywere from 15-25fps+

The FPS isn't the issue here. It's load times of those games where the RAM really makes the difference. 2GB is the standard now for gaming rigs. as soon as Vista is released, it's going to quickly become 4GB, because Vista itself is going to be a RAM hog.

 

[0zzy]

Get 2 gigs now. it'll be fine for Xp and Vista. In the future when bigger games come out for Vista, you can think of adding more RAM then.

 

[HDDFreak]

2gb is fine for now but as previously said 4gb would be good for vista. I believe though that with service pack 2 for XP Pro you can only have 3gb of RAM max, whereas sp1 can 'see' 4gb. Correct me if I am wrong though.

 

[mitch074]

Not exactly: XP sp1 saw 4 Gb but used 3.5Gb, sp2 reports what it actually uses.

If you optimize your XP system so that it uses as little RAM as possible, you can cut down RAM use by as much as 150-200 Mb (taskbar icons: control panels for sound and graphics, automatic updaters for Java, Itunes, Acrobat etc. Services: Microsoft server, Themes support, infrared support etc. Others: complex language support, dynamic swap file size etc. Apps: remove Norton, enable Windows firewall and load a free antivirus)

Interestingly, removing Microsoft Office to install OpenOffice will increase other apps' speed (it cleans up several megabytes of registry space, which have to be kept loaded in RAM at all times, and run through every time an app has to use it).

By doing so, RAM use after boot can drop from 300 Mb to as little as 110 Mb and boot take less than 40 seconds. Running processes would also go from 40-50 down to 27 (increased responsiveness)

All in all, it would make FEAR run with very little swap (unnoticeable during gameplay) with 1Gb. No swap at all with 2Gb.

Even on my dual-core 2Gb gaming rig, doing so reduces loading time, crashing, increases system responsiveness and overall speed. Of course, I'm back to using Win2K gray interface, but I always felt like I would be seeing Barney arriving soon on my desktop with the Luna theme...

Why did I go to 2 Gb then? Simple, I had a single 1Gb RAM stick - and I wanted dual channel. It did give me a speed boost.