2GB of RAM: Do We Really Need That Much?

Last question, what resolution/FSAA level are you playing at?

 

1280x1024 / 4xAA , 4xAF

 

Well, due to HL2's extensive high resolution textures it can benefit from 2 GB of ram, especially the load times.

 

i play bf2 @ 1600/1200 6aa 16afHQ, all settings Ultra. With 1gig of ram it hicths alot, with 2gigs no issues. 1800xtstock.
Should it be this way? well its a DICE engine.....

 

Hello All,

I would love to see 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB benchmarks done. With the 4GB it would be cool to run SuperCache II http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/supercache.php to use some of that extra. You can enable lazy writes which should is not a big deal when I play games. I would think that you would see less hitching (<20FPS) but I have not done any tests. SuperCache II has a free 30day trial period and it is $89 to buy. RAMDisk or RAMDisk Plus would be more interesting but many of my games would fit onto the RAM drive.

Dr. Ffreeze

 

Heh, if you send me 4x1gb DIMMs I'll run every benchmark you want.

 

My box runs so many resident background programs that some games get rather chuggy at times (especially WoW) with "only" 1GB installed. Upgrading to 2 fixed all that, and now I'm very satisfied.

Someone said the upgrade cost is roughly cost between vidcard generations, and while that sounds fairly accurate to me, you have to remember you don't get a vidcard for the cost difference between two different generations! A RAM upgrade is actually rather cheap really, a vidcard typically costs significantly more even if you choose the cheaper one of the two generations.

More RAM was a great investment for me personally. As always, YMMV.

 

And no stuttering? As I've said elsewhere, Quake 4 gets the stutters on my 7800GTX SLI setup @ Ultra/1280*1024/4xAA/16xAF. Strange...

 

The default heapsize for HL2 is set to 65536 bytes (64MB). I can't really see how loading more textures into RAM at start would speed up load times, though you may be right.

The bottom line, though, is that HL2 won't run any faster with 2GB RAM. It's not needed.

 

Why are you people running Quake 4 at ultra, anyway? I bet none of you could tell the difference from high, especially when moving around

 

Ken im using 4xAA , 4xAF not 16xAF...
Plus my 2gb are HyperX running at 215mhz ( 2.5-3-2-6-1T ) and my CPU is an 3.8+Dual.
Could the 3.5Gb swap file make a difference ? I dont know but do try it

 

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

You'll prolly find that you're only using 30-100MB of your pagefile.

I'm currently using 56MB and my session's peak is 105MB.

I set my permanent pagefile to 512MB.

Jawed

 

well if you force AF that's true but the limits of 4X AF can easily be seen in outdoor levels.

 

Im currently using 275mbytes from my Swap file....
When i play Q4 in ultra that sky rockets...
I dont know if 3.5gb will make any difference but i currently have 700gb HDs so 3.5gb is nothing.
Im taking my chances with this

 

AF is the same in High and Ultra Quality - they both set it automatically to 8X. The only difference between the two is that Ultra Quality doesn't use texture compression for lightmaps, which is why it needs more video RAM.

See http://www.tweakguides.com/images/Quake4_7.jpg for the difference. If you can't spot it staring at a still image you won't spot it when playing

 

hmm.. you're right, both set it to 8x.

 

By itself, Q4 on Ultra uses less than 1gb of memory for me. I should know since I have 2gb of ram and disabled the page file. Having a page file for playing Q4 will, if anything, decrease your speed since Windows may want to page some part of the windows backend to HD (for whatever reason) while you're playing. But if it gives you better speed with a 3,5gb page file, hey nothing wrong with a bit of placebo.

 

FYI, this incorrect. That's how D3 does it but in Q4, High Quality gives you 4xAF while Ultra gives you 8xAF (but you could just override it with a CVar).

In Q4, Ultra gives you over High Quality:

-Twice the number of aniso taps.
-Uncompressed specularmaps and diffusemaps.
-Torch casts shadows.
-Brass lasts longer.

Q4 doesn't use lightmaps.

You can quickly see the difference between High and Ultra in the first loading screen; the green one before the intro. While playing I can sometimes notice it, especially on fences and so on but yeah, it's probably not worth the penalty hit if you don't have a 512mb video card.

 

Well on the AF thing I looked it up (athough I thougt I was correct) and it seemed people thought it was like D3.
I remember setting Q4 to HQ and only having 4x AF but I thought maybe it was a fluke and I didn't want to search for the dvd (legit too).