How Much RAM Do You Really Need?

By Jon Kullberg
published

DirectX 8: Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 may not be the newest title, but once you start turning the settings up on a system with insufficient system memory it behaves just as badly as newer games. Compared to Quake 4 or Doom 3, benchmarking UT2004 is a totally different story. With just 512 MB system memory, benchmark results get inconsistent as you can see from the graph above. UT2004 with maximum settings and 512 MB system memory is not for the serious gamer.

DirectX 9: 3DMark 05

3DMark 2005 really proves the point: if the application doesn't need more system memory than you already have, adding more simply won't help at all.

DirectX 9: Far Cry

Despite the huge outdoor environments and with settings turned up, Far Cry is a game totally playable with no more than 512 MB system memory.

Jon Kullberg
5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • survivor1940
    I am a little confused as to what ram would work better with the Asus P5KPL-CM motherboard running intel E5200 CPU. I will not be gaming.I know I can use up to 3.5 Gbs of ram on my Windows XP 32 bit OS.The question is which would perform better> 2x1Gb ddr2-800 pc2 6400 or ddr2-667 pc2-5300?
    Reply
  • yugiteddy
    I use a Mac and a windows computer from IBM. I use the mac most of the time... it has 768 megabytes of ram.
    The Mac is a powerbook G4.
    Applications do crash but I like to do things quickly so that's why. With the IBM (Netvista), I don't use it that much, but sometimes I control it through RDC. The "Netvista" has 1 Gigabyte of ram.
    I don't really mind about the computers and the ram-I just care about that I can use them and that they don't crash each time I play a game.
    From someone, who is learning applescript.
    Reply
  • usasma
    I've got 12 gB of RAM and I still experience slowdowns. Today it was due to numerous programs reading my hard drive - and even the RAID 5 array didn't help.

    Performance is achieved by striking a good balance between RAM, CPU, Hard disks, and the mobo.
    Reply
  • my 256mb ram pc is working surprisingly fast.it take 2 minutes to load while my laptop got 2 gb ram and takes like 5mins to start up.my 256mb ram system has been (like you were saying) balanced to do tasks throughout the system that are necessary only and working amazingly well.
    Reply
  • 80725760
    Reply