When will we need 4GB of RAM to run games?

i'm planning on getting a notebook soon, and was wondering if there will ever be a point in time when 4gb will be the minimum amount of ram required to play games (the lappy i plan to get can't go beyond 2 gigs). i mean, i guess that it will have to happen eventually, but just how soon will it occur? hopefully not too soon... right?
tia

 

I don't think it'll be that soon. I mean most games still run pretty well with 1GB of RAM on XP, right?

 

Certainly not before 2009.

 

not 2009.the minimum for most games is 512 or 1gbrite now an it has been that way for a year so i wouldnt say in a year the requiremnt will jump that much . by 2009 i would say 1.5-2gb will be the minimum

 

Right now I know people who play games with 512 MB of RAM. Remember RAM isn't everything, processor speed and graphics card matters more. By then 1 GB will do fine, 1.5 GB tops. Thing is I don't want my 4 GB of RAM to out date toooo quickly lol.

Kinda sucks though, how technology changes so quickly eh?

 

Yeah, tell me about it

 

4GB can only become a minimum if 64bit Windows finally becomes a mainstream platform. That isn't going to happen during Vista's lifetime, because almost all OEM PCs are shipping with 32bit OSes.

 

So are you saying that we won't be seeing 4GB being the minimum requirement for gaming in the next 4 years (which I'm speculating would be Vista's lifetime)?

 

Please don't say such things! It hurts my DOS gaming soul.

 

+1

10chars.

 

Nowadays graphics cards have so much memory, we dun even need rams IMO. (even though they're not so similar)

 

I dont think that soon, but possible for around 2012 maybe

 

Agreed. Heck, in a 32bit OS, each application (like a game) is only allocated up to 2GB. So, while I do expect to see some titles offering "enhanced for 64bit OS" features in the next year or 2, I doubt mainstream gaming will shift over anytime soon.....too bad. Oh well, 640K is all we'll ever need

 

Yeah, Windows 7 will probably be the first time Windows is ONLY 64bit. Then we'll be talking about massive games that need more than 4GB of RAM...of course, if that much RAM is affordable at that time .

Seven is at least two years away, and it would be at least another year before it is adopted by the general PC community en-masse.

 

Not a minimum but recommended.

 

Windows 7???

wikipedia time

 

All true (except the 4GB part, in 32bit XP/Vista, each single app/game is limited to only 2GB) Frankly, Vista (IMO) should have been 64bit only. We're already very close to 32bit limitations today. I REALLY hope we don't have to repeat the "memory management" of the DOS era to run a game properly in years to come.

 

it is a question of whether you need up to 4Gb on your system rather than when you require it...

If you are a gamer and those games demand more memory then the days of 4Gb will be closer than you think... even nowadays some people manage well with 1Gb or even 512Mb RAM for games where as some people need more than that because they play games or use applications that demand more system memory

also, for gaming what counts most is the GPU RAM rather than the system RAM. if you expect to play good games then you should pay much attention on GPU specifications. that said more system RAM is a welcome feature. if you can throw extra bucks then go for more RAM

 

Certain games, such as Supreme Commander, have already experienced the limitations of a 32-bit operating system. In reality, I do not think actual physical RAM amount matters so much as the ability of the OS to address more than 4GB of data. Even with 4GB of RAM, I sometimes still hit the memory wall with Supreme Commander. One would think it odd that only about 2.4 GB of RAM are actually in use! But look closer and you find that the limitation comes with 32-bit OS limitations and not physical RAM limitations.

4GB of RAM wont become standard before the end of 2009. I agree with others who state that RAM amounts will only be increased when the limitations of 32 bit OS's have been done away with.

 

Well seeing how 4gb is Win x86 limit......if its min, that means only x64 can run recommend......and as the others said x64 is that widly used....so....maybe next windows release, but def. not in near future. Plus, by then, ram will be obsolte. The new SSD will be a reasonable price and pagefiles will be as fast as ram....thus meaning as much memory allocation as we want

 

RAM will not become obsolete Nuta. It can be written to and read from virtually an unlimited number of times. SSDs have a finite number of writes allowed before cells were to just stop writing successfully.

Some SSD cells can only take 10,000 writes (aka low end stuff), and some can take 10M-10B writes. But RAM...infinite. And for temporary storage that can change thousands of times per second...well, you get the idea.

 

More than that, while SSD throughput is currently peaking at around 120MB/sec (on a really good day on a really expensive SSD drive), RAM throughput is still in the neighborhood of...what is it, like 6-8GB/sec now?

 

4gb ram might not become mainstream by then. But they are developing somekind of dual memory thingi (1 stick) for duo core machines

 

Crysis runs fine on my computer which uses a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor at 1.8 GHz, with 1 GB of ram, and Windows XP SP2.

It's not lightning fast, but hey, it's not snail slow either. Takes about 45 seconds to load up a completely new game, and less than 5 seconds to load a previously saved game after dying.

So, it's not likely that games will require a minimum of 4GB to run, at least probably not for 5 years, unless the tech word suddenly drastically changes.

 

3-4 years, but by then motherboards for laptops would support more than 4GB maximum.