How Much RAM Do You Really Need?

DirectX 9: Battlefield 2

Battlefield 2 might be one of the most impractical games to benchmark, but it has a very nifty feature that records the rendering time for every frame during the demo, and outputs the frame number, rendering time and FPS for every frame into a .csv file. This file can be opened and analyzed using Microsoft Excel or most other spreadsheet programs.

The results indicated that if it takes three seconds to click the "enter game" button and actually start the demo, the 999 FPS your computer outputs at the loading screen will significantly alter the correct average FPS rate. For consistent and reliable benchmark results from Battlefield 2 you have to delete all bogus entries in the .csv file.

Battlefield 2 was reputed to see large benefits from more system memory. While that surely is the case when comparing 512 MB to 1 GB, we didn't really notice much of a difference between 1 and 2 GB in the demo we used.

You might be looking at the graph and think to yourself that the 15% performance gain doesn't really seems to be that big of a deal. We agree that 75.9 FPS instead of 89.3 FPS would hardly be noticeable if we were to compare a fluid 75.9 FPS sequence of images to one with 89.3. However, you will probably come to a totally different conclusion after reviewing the other graph below.

  • 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