Vista and Ram

Is 2G of ram enough when playing games under vista? or do i really need 4g ram?

 

2gb is enough

 

But doesnt vista take 1g for its need? And most games do demand 2g for optimal play.

 

2GB ram is enough BUT ! Indeed vista EATS a lot of ram, actually 3GB or 4GB is perfect...

But with 2GB your games will run fine to

 

Vista will get along fine with 2 GB, but 4 GB is best for optimal performance, particularly if you're going to be running the 64-bit version. If you're on 32-bit Vista and have 4 GB, your system will only see 3 GB. Still, it doesn't hurt to take every RAM advantage you can get.

 

He doesn't need 3-4 GB if he's not even using 2GB. If you tweak Vista a little bit, your RAM usage will be around 600, and even if you play a RAM hungry game, you wont be using 2GB.

So 3-4GB does not improve Vista performance, if you already have 2 GB

 

I went from 2 to 4 and noticed a significant impact. My hard drive stopped thrashing 24 hours a day, applications boot up slightly faster when 2 or more are already opened. I noticed I can alt+tab out of games and get back into them without as much delay. Most of these "performance" increases are not mandatory by any means. The jump from 2 to 4 is not as big as the jump from 1 to 2.

32 bit Vista only sees 3582mb of the total memory when you have 4gb installed.

 

I've read so many bad things about vista and I have the same concerns that Ghost does. Would it just be easier to run XP and not have to worry about it? Or is it not nearly as bad as people make it out to be?

How about 64 bit Vista?

 

Vista is, in my opinion, every bit as bad as its made out to be and worse. It does some nice things but for most things, It's a straight downgrade. Every game I own performs far worse under Vista than XP. Partly because of my "low-end" dual-core processor, I'm sure, and partly because my X-Fi is essentially useless in Vista because they dropped support for DirectSound3D. But there's an insane amount of stuttering in Source engine games, for example, and WiC and F.E.A.R. both suffer about a 50% performance drop form XP -> Vista.

As for RAM, here's my general rule of thumb: You want twice as much RAM for Vista as whatever you thought was plenty for XP. EG, if you thought 1GB was fine on XP, get 2GB for Vista. If you had 1.5GB and that was good, now you want 3. And if you're a pretty hardcore gamer who had 2GB under XP, you might as well get 4GB for Vista. It's not like RAM is expensive these days anyways - 2x 2GB DDR2 SoDIMMs are down to about $130-$150 total now anyways.

64-bit Vista is a driver nightmare, by the way, even more so than 64-bit XP thanks to our friend Mr. Driver Signature Enforcement. Forget about RMClock, SpeedFan, RivaTuner, or even CoreTemp if you go with 64-bit Vista.

 

Maybe I should just stick with XP then!

I think that many can get Vista to run well for them, but overall from what I read XP seems to provide better performance in the end. So if won't kill you to use XP, why wouldn't you? I am not a microsoft basher but I take everything they say with a grain of salt at all times, and much like the Vista Skeptic thread in the HP & Compaq section, I was always skeptical of Vista from day one. Just simply seeing the minimum requirements for most newer games gave me second thoughts, as the recommended ram under Vista is usually doubled from XP.

 

I think i will go to 3GB ram, will i notice a performance increase?? (also does this mean like a bit more fps?)

 

I dont think so, but shorter loading times.