4gigs and vista64 for games??

[jonj]

I have been thinking of upgrading to vista soon(with crysis comming out in november )and after hearing all the comotion over how vista is such a memory hog, I decided to upgrade my ram also. right now i have 2 gigs(800mhz 2x1gig sticks) of ram and a 8800gts 640mb. I read on toms forums that 32 bit operating systems cannot read a total of 4 gigs becuase of the video memory ram.

my question is- if i get vista64 will it recognize the full 4 gigs ram PLUS the graphic card memory. if it will not, i will probally just buy 2x512mb. thanks

 

[bazza]

yep vista64 and any other 64bit windows OS will detect the 4G as long as the board supports it

yep vista is a memory hog but i suspect a lot of it is used for caching various things

my vista uses 800M on bootup and my xp uses 200M., but when i load the same game, total usuage is roughly the same

 

[accu]

same here i have 2gb rams and only 1gb left after vista64 bootup. games like supreme commanders will need more than 1gb of ram.

 

[jonj]

I am planning on running supreme com and crysis.
if i get 4 gigs , vista 64 will see it all?? i really want this to run smooth, but i dont want to waste money if my 8800gts's ram will interfere with the 4 gigs.

 

[mannwhite]

I am planning on running supreme com and crysis.
if i get 4 gigs , vista 64 will see it all?? i really want this to run smooth, but i dont want to waste money if my 8800gts's ram will interfere with the 4 gigs.

What interference are you talking about m8? I don't see how they could interfere with each other. You may have a mistaken impression somewhere. Unless I'm mistaken I don't think they've got anything to do with each other, the only case where ram is used as videoram is in the case of an integrated graphics chipset, unless I'm mistaken.

In any case, I think you can rest easy that vista 64 will read your full 4gig ram and your graphics card will work fine. You're practically in the exact same boat that I am as I'm going to do the exact same thing. I can't wait for crysis, the 9800 or whatever they're going to name it and the phenom to come out.

 

[navarone]

first i ever heard of video ram interfering with system ram....

the video card only access system ram when its own onboard memory is filled up....which would slow the game down. But thats been the case since Vid cards came out decades ago.

Vista 64 bit can see and access 4 gigs of ram and more no problem

XP cant

 

[dengamle]

i guess the interference he's talking about are the physical memory addresses various hardware resources takes up, including ram on the graphics card. It gets crowded very quickly in a 32-bit system, with a lot of system ram, where only 4GB of physical memory space is available

 

[bydesign]

first i ever heard of video ram interfering with system ram....

the video card only access system ram when its own onboard memory is filled up....which would slow the game down. But thats been the case since Vid cards came out decades ago.

Vista 64 bit can see and access 4 gigs of ram and more no problem

XP cant

Your statement is not correct about video card using system RAM. With Xp only card designed for shared memory and provided drivers could access any system memory. A decade ago no video cards uses system memory. Now with Vista that support is built into the OS. No matter how much memory your card has Vista will allocation more memory to the card

To the original poster
You are not going to see that big of a difference going from 2GB to 4GB in Vista. You will be able to open more things before things start slowing down. Despite what others have stated your boot up time will be more less the same, apps take just as long to load and so on. What you will see in apps that address more ram is an increase in performance. Crysis should be able to do just that and is said to be optimized for 64bit operation. I would like to see a side by side caparison though.

As a side note Ready Boost will improve load times I saw a 50% improvement in some apps.

 

[hassa]

Basically it comes down to numbers

2^32 = 4294967296 bytes
= 4194304 KB
= 4096 MB
= 4GB

As has been previously mentioned, if you use a 32 bit OS, that is the maximum amount of addressable space INCLUDING RAM and device mappings (e.g. IO, GPU etc...)

As a result, the amount of RAM available is 4GB - whatever is used = ~3.25GB RAM according to most people's experiences.
Under a Vista64 environment, that 4GB limit increases,allowing enough room to git in the 4GB of ram and all the device mappings etc... (as long as your motherboard will support it).

I've been looking into this myself for when I build my new machine - 64 bit Ultimate is what I am looking at along with something like this

Q6600
2x2GB RAM (still working out what to get)
P35 chipet (waiting to find out if 38 will be worth it)
8800 GTX, 2900XT or a 2nd gen card depending on when they come out
HD, case, PSU, KB, Mouse etc... are still under review (with some current preferences, but that could change)
Already have a DELL 24" Monitor

But the one thing I have decided on is Vista 64bit....

 

[butcher]

good luck finding drivers ect for vista64

thats the only reason i have not gone to 64bit

 

[Lazarus7]

I'm running vista 64 with 4gb of ram and an 8800gtx and I find it to be excellent. There are plenty of drivers out there for 64-bit, and I find the 4gb of ram very useful. When my system is in idle it already sits on ~30% ram usage which is about 1.2gb, and when playing games such as mark of chaos or supreme commander it goes anywhere up to 80%, so its using over 3gb of the ram. Apparently Vista 64 checks how much ram you have and if it is 4gb or more then it will reallocate some processes and make more use of the ram you have available, eg with 2gb it will use ~800mb on idle, with 4gb it uses ~1.2gb.

Hope that helps

 

[randomizer]

Ok "vista uses more RAM than XP" is a better statement than "Vista is a RAM hog"

SuperFetch is one of the reasons behind this. Vista automatically loads commonly used programs into the RAM at startup and also after startup. Therefore those programs will start faster when you run them because they have already been loaded into the RAM. XP is not as "intelligent" in its management of memory, therefore nothing is loaded into the RAM until it is requested. Vista uses spare RAM for a useful purpose, rather than XP which wastes it. What use is unused RAM? Might as well prepare it for when it is required.

 

[accu]

I'm running vista 64 with 4gb of ram and an 8800gtx and I find it to be excellent. There are plenty of drivers out there for 64-bit, and I find the 4gb of ram very useful. When my system is in idle it already sits on ~30% ram usage which is about 1.2gb, and when playing games such as mark of chaos or supreme commander it goes anywhere up to 80%, so its using over 3gb of the ram. Apparently Vista 64 checks how much ram you have and if it is 4gb or more then it will reallocate some processes and make more use of the ram you have available, eg with 2gb it will use ~800mb on idle, with 4gb it uses ~1.2gb.

Hope that helps

listen to someone who use vista64 and 4gb, nuff said. i do understand why some people think 4gb are a waste, but people use their's pc differently. i have fairly good rig, 8800gts640 e6420 and 2gb rams, but games like supreme commanders will need more than 1gb ram after vista64 bootup. trust me 4gb will not be wasted, from now on.

 

[dg6464]

Alright; just as a quick side note:

The user who gave the numbers is correct with regards to 32-bit OS being able to handle ~3.25GB of RAM due to resitrictions. With regards to 64-bit OS's, you do the math over so for
32-bit:

2^32 = 4294967296 bytes
4194304.000 kilobytes
4096.0000 megabytes
4.00000 gigabytes
0.003906 terabytes
0.0000038 petabytes
0.00000000 exabytes

64-bit:

2 ^ 64 = 18446744073709551616 bytes
= 18014398509481984.000 kilobytes
= 17592186044416.0000 megabytes
= 17179869184.00000 gigabytes
= 16777216.000000 terabytes
= 16384.0000000 petabytes
= 16.00000000 exabytes

of RAM...
64-bit Will on no way, shape or form grow old with regards to addressing space any time in our lifetime (god I hope not...). It is just manufacturers way of future-proofing products for the future, but in most cases it is not needed yet. There are ways to "trick" the Operating System and hardware into reading larger RAM amounts for server applications (ie: 64GB of RAM), but Server platforms are all generally going 64-bit now as well.

RAM amount for your system in no way is affected by your video cards RAM ***UNLESS*** you are using onboard video (which I hope most people who game on this forum DO NOT USE); in which case the RAM is directly shared with your RAM.

With Regards to the POST about Windows XP not having something similar to "Superfetch" as they call it in Vista; yes it does in actual fact, it is called "Prefetch", hence where Vista got the name "Superfetch". This can for one thing make viruses very difficult to get rid of, as the code still sits idle, even if the virus executable is erased, the prefetch file still partially fetches the program. If you take a look under Windows XP in "C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch" you will see the files that are prefetched on startup, or you can do a search for "*.pf", the files normally look something like this: "STEAM.EXE-15609EA3.pf" (This is one for STEAM for my system). There are programs to clean and stop prefetching (as it is not nearly as effective (if at all) in XP as in Vista. Please nobody refer to Vista as a memory "hog", it is simply the future (unfortunatelly it might end up like WinME... lol). When XP came out did it require more "resources" than 98 or ME? Yes. It is not just RAM that Vista utilizes much more of, but all resources in the computer (CPU, Video, Memory, Hard-drive). Vista will still run (and I have tested) on a 550MHz Celeron with 256MB RAM, just slowly. It has been optimized to grade your system (according to some sort of ridiculous grading scheme (M$ ftw ), and set it's used resources accordingly. If you only have 1GB of RAM or higher, that is sufficient to run Vista, but to run it well, you should have 2GB or higher. The reason the other people that have 4GB are using over 3GB is because Vista was designed to use everything it can to make itself run smoothly. Any more questions, just post again, and we'll go from there, otherwise i'll babble more and bore everyone into not reading anymore.

I hope this helps to answer your question, so the answer is "YES" Vista 64-bit WILL read all of your 4GB RAM, + Video RAM; and currently there ARE drivers available for ANY new products that enter the market for 64-bit Operating Systems (not EVERYTHING, but generally all Gaming-related products). The only thing is sometimes you have to "force" the drivers in against their will, and be a bit a of a tech to figure out the small things like Older Printers and Modems (who uses modems?!?).

God Speed :O

 

[jitpublisher]

To the OP, through all the long winded psts here very simply you are correct.
XP 32 can address 4gig of TOTAL memory. Yes, you have to count all the memory in your system, IO, harddrives, controller cards, system memory, anything in your system that has memory attached to it, and yes, the video card memory too, all must be added up. So if you put in 4 gigs of main memory, what 32 bit Windows can use of it is what is left over after you take all the other memory in your system into account and subtract it from the 4 gigs. Most people end up with somewhere around 3.2-3.5 gig of main memory left that is usable.
64 bit Vista will be able to use all 4 gigs of your main memory.
Also just so no one nitpicks, this is not relevant to 64 bit XP or Windows server platforms, they handle memory differently, but that is another story for another post.

 

[dengamle]

64-bit doesn't do it alone. You usually have to activate a memory remap function in bios before all ram can be used.

About tricking 32-bit server editions into seeing more than 4 GB. I prefer to call it extending the physical memory space. It's a feature of the cpu, not just a lame software-trick

 

[Hatman]

good luck finding drivers ect for vista64

thats the only reason i have not gone to 64bit

Complete4 rubbish, if you did go 64bit youd find it works with almost everything, so from someone who HAS gone 64bit, Im telling you that there are hardly no incompatabilities anywhere.


Vista lvoes ram, the more ram the better performance, when I load up it uses like 3gb. Hell I was even considering going to 8gb for my new build! Unfortunatly 2gb modules are quite expensive

 

[GenericName]

Down the road I'm going to swap out 4 for 8 gigs (when price drops) as my MB can support up to that much. Some can go to 64 gigs or something crazy.

I'm running Vista 64 and it sees all 4 gigs or RAM

 

[dengamle]

If you install 8 GB, you might run into the same problem as 4 GB in 32-bit systems. It depends on how large a physical address space it supports (8 GB RAM + xxx MB MMIO > 8 GB)

 

[Hatman]

Most motherboards support 8gb of ram and the OS can support 16gb. It would work fine.

You can already be the owner of 8gb oif memory for £300, but for my new build id much rather be the owner of 2gb of fast memory for a mere £80..

 

[dengamle]

It doesn't matter how much memory the OS supports, if the hardware doesn't

 

[netburst]

well its been said. the 64bit sw WILL show all of the RAM that you will be able to fin on your mobo. and as for drivers, i am currently usin vista ultimate 64 and so far theres no problem for any of my driver.
and i can still use almost all of my sw i used for my XP pro 32bit.... cheers.

 

[dengamle]

64-bit Windows will find whatever ram that has been given an address. If the hardware supports a maximum of 8 GB address space, and some of it is used for memory mapped i/o, how much is left for ram?

 

[harmattan]

Yes, in answer to you question, Vista x64 will recognize a full 4GB of RAM or more, whereas x32 OS's will not.

As a side note, I've been running Vista Premium x64 for over a month now. I find it is more stable than xp (fewer IE lock-ups, non-responding programs) and have had little problem finding drivers that work. If it was 6 months ago, I'd say hold off. But Vista x64 is now at a point where most everything works, even SLI now. The only drawback is that it is a memory hog, but that's more the case with Vista itself, not x64.

 

[jonj]

i guess the interference he's talking about are the physical memory addresses various hardware resources takes up, including ram on the graphics card. It gets crowded very quickly in a 32-bit system, with a lot of system ram, where only 4GB of physical memory space is available

This is what i ment