RAM and games

how much would adding 1GB of RAM affect the performance of games. I know games rely mostly on the GPU but would adding ram make it noticeably faster?

 

It depends on the games. The more advanced newer games like FEAR and Oblivion will love 2GB of ram over 1Gb and run much better. There aren't many games that wouldn't benefit from the extra Gb of ram, although for older games the difference will be less noticeable apart from loading times.

 

A lot depends on your system, how many services and apps you have running in the background. As soon as your system starts paging (read and write to the hard drive) its all over and performance is going downhill and fast. Paging is especially bad on laptops since for the most part drives are slower than desktop drives.

 

if you're thinking about upgrading the gateway in your sig from 1gig to 2 for better gaming performance, don't bother.

the extra ram will give practivally no performance boast when playing newer games

if you find your computer slow to respond when you have a lot of background programs runnning and you want to upgrade to 2 gigs to imporve the performance of the computer when not playing games, then it is worth it. extra ram will help smooth our performance when you have lots of background programs running.

 

Well since you have a integrated gpu there is no poin, the gpu u have is holding you back not ram. Since you dont play new games oviously(integrated)there wont be need to get another gb of ram.

 

Absolutely.

 

no ^ (to above)


it doesn't matter if its bf2142, you will notice almost 0 difference in games.

high requirement games will see no difference in performance because your gpu bottleneck so much that theres practially no gain in fps. old games will benefit more but still not enough to warrent the purchase as they don't require that much ram.

buying ram to improve gaming performance on that gateway rig will be pointless. whats the point of increasing a 7 fps to 8 fps (if getting ram will improve even 1 fps)?

 

ah i see...but windows vista takes up 500 mb + of my ram just being idle...so was wondering if i come increase some performance in that sense..

...and yea its not like I can run oblivion or fear in the first place so this is meant for older games lol

 

increasing ram on that rig will improve overall office work performance but not much gaming performance.

for games like HL2, you might see some worthwhile gains but for games like fear, oblivoin and soon to come games (likely supreme commander, c&c3, though not 100% since not released) the increase in performance will barly be noticiable

 

You will see a performance in the windows system itself just no in any games. So yes it would help with Vista/XP Home/Pro/MCE

 

Here`s the bottom line. When you are running a game and the total mem charge > physical memory: upgrade bonus.

If not: no bonus. Nothing.

That said, chances are you`ll go well above 1GB when running any game from the last year or so on Vista.

 

I'm planning that upgrade.

After testing the latest Rainbow Six e notice my system was using 1011 MB of memory on XP (i've 1 GB).
Without the game i have less than 30 process and use around 250 MB and 300 MB of memory (instead of ~60/70 processes, ~600 MB when i bought it).

More than one year ago i upgraded ram on my desktop and notice a huge improvement, specially on Battlefield 2.
I couldn't play the game before (with decent settings), but after upgrading, not only i played with no breaks/slowdown but i could even play with higher VIDEO settings.

Based on what do people write "1 GB more will cause no effect on games"
Just curious...

 

slowdive

1) what gpu do you have? if your game was ram limited, of course you will see difference in games like bf2. the person in question has a gma, most if not all games will be gpu limited in his case which adding more ram will not benefit much in terms of gaming performance

2) of course you will see benefit from games such as bf2 (or bf 2142 or fear). those games are memory hogs. even peeps with a 7900gs will complain of initial lag when they first join a game when they have 1 gig ram. that is cause they are RAM limited, NOT gpu.

i do agree with ice tea that running vista, 1 gig and gaming don't mix well.

vista itself takes a lot of memory

 

Depends. It's documented that the GMA 950 benefits greatly from more ram, and dual channel ram. Have a look on YouTube for videos of the MacBook playing HL2. And notice the difference between 1GB and 2GB.

That being said, in the OP's case, I can't say with any certainly whether or not the ram upgrade will help you, sorry.