More RAM?

[kaazmar]

I am running an Atholn 3400+ with 1g ram and a BFG Nvidia 6800 OC...I have been playing a lot of demanding games. Half Life 2 runs great, except maybe sometimes there is a bit of choppiness in huge open areas, but really not that much. You think another 512mb of ram would improve the speed/performance of my computer, or is adding anymore at this point just showing off?

J

 

[uzi9mm]

1gb should be enough If you add 1.5gb there won't be much of a difference...... Also you said you expirence some chopping in big open areas...... Maybe your video card is choking. If you have it at 6x AA, 16x AF, and the highest resolution/quality, I don't care what card you have it is going to chop here and there in big open areas. Try to notch some of the "un-needed" stuff down.

 

[Trifid]

I have 1.5gb's and I have tried it with only one 1gb in my system, and I don't notice a difference between them.

Lower the resolution a bit, and the AA and AF. All the settings should be able to be at high. (are you using the recomended settings that HL2 shows by a little '*'?)

 

[jolancer]

adding more then 1gb of ram wont increase any performance... it will perform the same but what more ram does is... smoothes out stuff such as those loading pausess in some games.

the slight choppyness you get in HL2 is all your GFX card, has nothing to do with system ram.

if your on a CRT monitor, you probably cant notice a difference from 1280x ress, 4xAA, 8 or 16xAF... to anything higher so you dont need to run it any higher.

*note* - enabling FPS in HL2 will allow you to see witch options choke up your fps the mose... just either... input this cmd into the target line on in the HL2 icon shortcut, or into the console

-example 'shortcut target path' = "c:\Program files\valve\hl2" -steam -console +cl_showfps "1"

or just add the -console part and input "cl_showfps 1" into console.

 

[LoTeX]

*note* - enabling FPS in HL2 will allow you to see witch options choke up your fps the mose... just either... input this cmd into the target line on in the HL2 icon shortcut, or into the console

-example 'shortcut target path' = "c:\Program files\valve\hl2" -steam -console +cl_showfps "1"

or just add the -console part and input "cl_showfps 1" into console.

or just install FRAPS ---> http://www.fraps.com/

the slight choppyness you get in HL2 is all your GFX card, has nothing to do with system ram.

hmmm...how bout cpu?

 

[GrimReaper23]

hmmm...how bout cpu?

that is what I was thinking but it looks fine.

 

[LoTeX]

well, u could test this by setting the resolution very slow and no antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, but keep the drawing distance, shadows etc. maxed out.

 

[pc_boy]

http://tech-heaven.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57810

scrool down 'till the RAM section

 

[realtechtalk]

I am running an Atholn 3400+ with 1g ram and a BFG Nvidia 6800 OC...I have been playing a lot of demanding games. Half Life 2 runs great, except maybe sometimes there is a bit of choppiness in huge open areas, but really not that much. You think another 512mb of ram would improve the speed/performance of my computer, or is adding anymore at this point just showing off?

J

When the game is playing, if possible switch back to your desktop and do a ctrl-alt-delete and look at the performance tab and see how much physical RAM is free.

If there is less than 100 megs free or so and sometimes you hear a lot of disk access and the game slows down then I would say yes it will help. If you're seeing lots of free memory which I think you will then there will be no performance benefit.

Be sure to close any unused or unnecessary programs when playing games to free up more memory