Interesting: is 2gb ram worth it??

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grego

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I currently run a gig of low latency ram, and until now, I have figured the leap to 2gb isn't worth it. I just came across an interesting article on tomshardware though, in which they explore that very idea. I've only read the first 1/3, but I'm already convinced and will consider upgrading my ram a lot more seriously now. What swayed me is that they proved that while an extra gig of ram may only show an average FPS of a ~5-10 frames greater, it provides a much more constant frame rate. That is, many less dips in FPS down to the undesirable regions. Here is a link to the middle of the article, with what I'm talking about.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/how_much_ram_do_you_really_need/page6.html
 
About 2/3 down that article it sais they were useing a demo...

If they were to play multiplayer full version with a full map that would change those statistics in vast amount of ways.

Since the spec's for the demo are lower then the spec's for the full version.

I know this because I've been playing BF2 for a long time now.
 
Yes 2GB of Ram provides a much more constant framerates then 1GB espicially in games such as BF2, CoD2, and F.E.A.R
 
IMO 2GB still isn't a practical upgrade as it is still expensive and still has limited practical uses...sure there are some stuff out there that can benefit from larger system resources, but they're very limited and very poorly optimized...you're fine with 1GB

Furthermore, memory bandwidth is a much larger role in performance than physical memory size...AMD64s are efficent are using smaller system resources to their advantage therefore 1GB is still standard as far as I'm concerned and any larger amounts will start to kill your memory bandwidth
 
1gb is still the sweetspot but u will see benefits from going to 2gb... just not price/performance viable.
 
gaara said:

Furthermore, memory bandwidth is a much larger role in performance than physical memory size...

I agree with most of what you say, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. I would agree however, that it is indeed very important and could be crippling. Just to prove my point, let's set up this hypothetical:

Let's say you have an otherwise average rig, with 256mb ram, running xp pro, anti-virus, firewall, aim. Now lets say that your 256mb ram has a bandwith of five times typical DDR400 ram. Trying to play BF2 or FEAR is not going to be very enjoyable with so little ram, no matter how fast it is. The bottom line is that if you only have 256mb ram, you can only store that much. If you want to put more data in ram, you're going to have to write some to the hdd, then access the new data. As we all know, hdd are slow as hell. So... memory bandwidth didn't save you where 4x more capacity at 5x less speed would have.
 
he was comparing 1gig and 2 gig

using 256 is faar too low no matter what speed

1 gig just means that it will occationally have to write from hdd and 2gig means hardly ever but 256 is constant
 
It sounded like a general statement, but if he was comparing 1 to 2, I would tend to agree.
 
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