Battlefield 2, Continued

In our demo, slightly less than 1,500 frames are rendered, and in the graph above we've taken the value for each and every frame and displayed it as a line. This really shows you the impact of having insufficient system memory while playing a game using a lot of big textures. As you can clearly see, the green line which represents 2 GB system memory shows some variance, but compared to the blue 512 MB line, it looks almost flat.

As the graph shows; with insufficient system memory, your computer will have to access the hard drive a lot, and that will severely hurt the game play. The absolutely worst part is all these deep dips - they will really hurt your aim and reaction time.

Just to show you one more example, we took the data for each frame from the graph before, and sorted it in ascending order. You will notice that on the right side of the graph, the lines look almost the same. But what's really of interest for us is the left part. With 2 GB system memory, the game performance is for the most part kept above 60 FPS. Only 2.3% of all 1500 frames are rendered with a lower speed than that, which of course results in very smooth game play. With 512 MB, however, you see that a huge 25.8% of the demo drops below 60 FPS, which is far from ideal.