Forget the recommended settings of Crysis. 2 gigs of ram has already hit it's peak.

In my fully modded, super Oblivion, with all the crap, 1680x1050, tons of plants and trees, whats holding me back right now is... ram . I'm realizing it right now, I'm getting 20 fps because I only have 2 gigs of ram

The ol' signs of low ram is quite evident... As I play Oblivion, it gets slower. If I leave Oblivion early, programs run a bit slowly. If I come back to Oblivion, IT'S slower. If I play oblivion too long, I end up with a lovely fps of 9 and when I leave, programs hardly open and I gotta reset.

It's not a ram problem (as in, defective ram), everything else plays perfectly fine. Nothing else does this. It's Oblivion, and people who buy Crysis are going to quickly find out how wrong the general population is to think 2 gigs of ram is all you'll need.

2 gigs will still be fine for a little while, for business use, most programs, hell, medium/low settings for Crysis. But high settings, and anything after Crysis, and...

 

You don't have a dx10 gpu though...

 

The introduction of Vista plus the new DX10 cards I fear are going to bring memory prices to obscene levels.

 

Sounds like a memory leak, not just a RAM limitation.

Either way, a single process under 32bit Windows is limited to 2GB of RAM max, so going with more than 3GB of RAM won't help anything except multitasking.

 

Why not just check you task manager and see how much ram you are actually using?

Just because one game uses alot of ram doesn't mean every game is going to use a lot of ram. Oblivion is not Crysis.

Choice of video card and secondly, amount of onboard video card memory will determine what graphics settings you can run a game at. Running out of ram doesn't slowly drop your frame rates over time, it causes pauses and stutters due to hard drive access.

 

Oh when it starts dropping to 9 fps it starts pausing and stuttering.

it takes two hours for it to do that.

After I play for 2-3 hours, pc has gotta reboot.

And Oblivion is not Crysis. I'm looking at Crysis right now, and shiver. If this is giving me trouble, what will Crysis do?

The big wigs are saying get 4 gigs of ram. I think it's time people stopped ignoring them...

 

Who are the "big wigs".

Far Cry looks better than BF2, yet needs less ram. Looks aren't an indicator of system ram needs/usage.

 

Sounds like your GPU is overheating and underclocking itself. I can play Oblivion just fine on 1GB of ram for hours. Not that I want to anymore, but I used to.

 

I've ran heat tests... At most it goes up to 50-60c (I'm really guessing, I haven't seen it go up super high). I leave oblivion and it's still the same clocks.

It's definately a ram issue. No doubt about that.

Oh, and Vista will require lots more.

Everyone has to make their own choice though. If you want to say 2 gigs of ram is perfectly fine, be my guest. If you find out it isn't, well...

 

You know, I hear a lot of people always saying "Vista will require this much of RAM, blah, blah, blah..."

I ran Vista for nearly 6 months, including the terrible Beta 2, much better RC1, and the pretty stable RC2. I only have 1GB of RAM and I never had a problem. It was faster than XP in a lot of ways. The computer booted faster, programs opened faster, everything seemed faster, even though my memory usage did go up. Vista will technically run on 512MB, so if 2GB is not enough, then your standards are way too high. Of course my interest in Vista has diminished to practically 0 (I'm sticking with Linux as much as possible now), but still, it's not going to be the huge resource killer like everyone makes out. 1 gig is fine and 2 gigs is more than enough.

 

Oh, and by the way, it sounds like you have another problem somewhere. If I can run BF2142 on my computer fine for 2 hours and high/med settings with 1 gig, then you should not drop to 9fps even in Oblivion. It sounds like either a memory leak or a GPU problem as stated above, but my guess would be a memory leak.

 

No doubt it's a ram issue? Thousands play Oblivion, a higher percentage of those people probably have 1GB or less of system ram. Are FPS slowdowns being reported by the masses with less than a gig?

Have you checked your task manager yet? You could find out how much ram you're using and what's using it.

 

I did not played Oblivion that much, when when i tested it, windows xp with game started used just about 1 gig of ram together.

 

Like I said, a fully, hyper modded oblivion, set for my x1900... qarls 2.0 textures, parallax textures, 4096x4096 far away textures, the mod where you can see things far away, 120 trees, grass set to 13000, grass level set to 10...

IMO the ram is having to load so **** much it's chocking.

Yet it still doesn't look as good as Crysis will look.

It is a good argument that one game looking better doesn't mean more ram usage, but still, generally speaking, the better looking a game, the more ram usage their is.

 

Well, if you have such a heavily modded Oblivion, why do you care its taking 2gb of RAM? You super modded it yourself with all the eye candy, now deal with it using all of you 2gb of RAM, dont complain, you MADE Oblivon use 2gb, Oblivion didnt do it on itself.

 

LOL

I'm not complaining, all I'm saying is, even a heavily modded oblivion doesn't lay a finger to Crysis. Which is why I'm saying Crysis at medium or high settings will probably require 4 gigs of ram.

There are alot of good points in this topic, and one good point that wasn't mentioned is Oblivion is a bad engine.

But still, the better looking a game, generally speaking, the more ram it takes.

 

Zellio you are forgetting one important thing here. Oblivion is not optimilazed for PC but for the XBOX360, it is a direct import from a console.

The graphics that Oblivion can offer are very good, but it requires too much hardware. Crysis instead is optimilazed for PC and will run better then Oblivion (compared with the hardware).

Charlie

 

Persoanally, I'm going to check my computer's task manager to see my ACTUAL ram usage before I go and spend wads of cash on 4 GB. This may be a little too scientific for some, but seeing as I have a ton of experience with gaming and computers, my instinct just says "wait and see" on this one.

 

You'd probably be just fine on low/medium, or possibly even medium. If you were to say get a 8800 or a 7950 sli'd and were using vista, and set it to all high settings, there's a very good chance you'll be using so much memory you'll need 4 gigs (or more) of ram. That is all...

And beyond that, games will require even more. It soon will become the norm...

 

Ugh... am I the only one annoyed by these claims, to me its sounds like a bunch of bs.

Like others in this thread have claimed, the problem you are describing is almost for sure a memory leak, either with system ram or the memory on the video card. The reason you are probably running into this issue is because of the mods you're using. Also the setup you have in general is probably struggling to run Oblivion at the settings you've listed. Even an 8800gts would barely run what you say you have Oblivion set to.

If you're gonna make claims such as this, have some evidence to back it up so you don't give people false information and influence people into buying what they don't need.

 

Here's the thing, look at a character from Oblivion:

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/697/697209/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-20060320074201610.jpg

Then look at a character from Crysis:

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/702/702309/crysis-20060419092912630.jpg

Can you really say, even with a heavily optimized game, on the highest settings you ram WON'T work it's arse off?

The entire point here is that the big gamers will hafta get 4 gigs of ram... But if the big gamers are already gonna hafta do it, in a year or two, everyone will.

 

Well one thing DX10 and the new WDDM in Vista adds is a better memory manager. DX10 is also more efficient, such as having 20% less overhead, and has better performance for a given task than DX9 so perhaps that will help. Also, next generation high-end graphics cards will come with 1GB of video memory so that should offload quite a bit of things from the main memory or hard drive. Offloading an additional 512MB of textures and stuff from the main memory goes a long way to making 2GB a lot more roomy.

Is the Crysis shots we've seen to date actual game code or just a technology demo? If it's just a technology demo, they'd obviously be puching things to the limit, but the real game code will probably be quite a bit lighter and not look quite as good.

 

All those mods you have are killing your system, not the game itself. Not only are they very demanding mods, but I'm sure their code is nowhere near as efficient as the game's code, and they are probably gonna use a lot of memory themselves.

 

There's a lot more to good graphics than RAM usage. And as several people have mentioned already, the "progressive slowdown" you talk about sounds like a memory leak; probably from one of your 'extensive mods'.

RAM usage has a lot more to do with good programming than good graphics; sure, as texture sizes and polygon complexity goes up RAM usage will rise, but that's more of an issue for video RAM, not system RAM. Also, using efficient data structures can make a huge difference. In any case, presenting a memory leak in one program and a press screenshot from another one really doesn't make for a very convincing argument.

I'm not saying average game RAM usage won't go up; of course it will. But that's nothing new - I used to play games on a system with 4 megabytes of RAM not so long ago. Needing 4 gigabytes in a couple of years sounds perfectly reasonable; as would needing 4 terabytes in another 10 to 15.