4-6GB of RAM no longer sufficient for Wargame Airland Battle

I recall previously, some people mentioned that 4 GB of RAM was sufficient for gaming.

Nope:

 

Show all the other processes opened. System requirements for the game call for 2GB... big discrepency.

Although that game does look awesome. I might have to pick it up!

 

No, Windows 7/8 'needs' 8GB by itself... 16GB is currently the sweet spot for RAM vs. system responsiveness for 'light' tasks.


When a ~10% extra cost doubles/extends the real world usability of a new system - it is like throwing money away to 'save' $50-$100 now, but have to buy a new system years before it would be otherwise needed. And buying the RAM in a few years will almost always be more expensive, not to mention the fact that the system was running suboptimal all that time beforehand...

Even for gaming, more RAM is 'worth it' - as your setup shows.

Maximum FPS may not increase significantly (if at all) - but the minimum FPS will make the system feel like a much more powerful setup.




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Really? Is that considered the minimum or the mean amount?

 

ah my fav game atm.
the game is resource intensive in the sense that it does make more use of cpu/ram and not just gpu resources compared to other games. i constantly see my cpu cores on high temps with this game.
the game does have huge maps, has hundreds of units in battle and uses 'realistic' ranges, armor and pentration tables.

well imho windows itself needs 8gb of ram to 'breathe'. as for the game, it may be using ram as a repository/cache for all those graphic assets the game needs. so yeah maybe you need more than 4gb.

but whatever the case may be, having 8gb (or more) will be beneficial for your computing as a whole.

 

Can anyone confirm if the game supports quad cores properly? I've checked Task Manager before, and it reported above 60% for all cores in the middle of fights for my i7 720qm (1.6 GHz).

I'll bring up a screenshot of it when I'm on my gaming laptop.

It's a fun game. Except when you're on a 10v10 round and six of your teammates leave the game, leaving you to micromanage three different fronts and respond to three different pushes.

Though I do recall witnessing a true flame war. 30 Russian flamethrower infantry vs 30 French flamethrower infantry, in a forest/urban area. The fun lasted until someone called in napalm bomber jets and forgot friendly fire was on.

 

Sorry, I thought I was clear that it is 'my' minimums.

Especially considering the inconsequential cost vs. the rest of the platform and the performance to be gained.

 

Lately, a 8GB of RAM cost at least $60, far from 6 months ago where you could get one for around $30.

 

$60 is still less than a dinner for two.

And there are still sporadic sales where even today you can get them cheaper... (Just bought 16GB PC3 12800 for $101 CDN, for example).

I agree that RAM was insanely cheap at the beginning of the year - but even today we don't really have anything to complain about (I've bought RAM @ $400 for 2MB modules and when I bought 2x 4GB Sodimms for $400 almost 4 years ago - it was a good deal then too - for the performance gained).

 

Alrighty...I was gonna say. The desktop I built for my family is only using 4GB but I figured that's more than enough to run Windows 7 for casual use, albeit slow from the lack of SSD, snappy RAM and CPU, etc.

 

4 GB is my bare minimum requirement for a primary system (for average Joe use), 8 GB is my preferred minimum (gaming, etc.) if you will and moar if you can obviously. That is from my own experience using systems with 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB on Windows 7 (4, 8, 16 and 32) and Windows 8 (2 and 32).

 

8GB is my bare minimum with no SSD. With an SSD it can be 4GB, but I really don't like running on anything less than 8.

Preferred is 16-32GB. Never a single hangup with that amount of RAM... even with most HDD's as a primary OS drive.

And yes, I run with a bare minimum page file as well.

 

more than 8gb will allow you to live without a pagefile - unless you have horrible legacy apps that require them.

 

Since SSDs I don't like having a page file. It's kind of a habit to almost disable it now.

I still leave the service on, and a minimum selected (512MB-1024MB for a minimum of 8GB of RAM).

 

Or if your computer crashed and you want to see the logs.

 

Which takes up a whopping 1MB only. And what would you do with such a crash log fie? Probably stare at it and go on a forum to ask for help.

There are workarounds anyhow like this: How to use the DedicatedDumpFile registry value to overcome space limitations on the system drive when capturing a system memory dump - Ntdebugging Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

With the high RAM amount (i.e. 8-16GB) on systems that even amateurs use now and low storage space with SSD's (although increasing by a significant amount annually), nobody wants to "waste" 16GB for a pagefile + 16GB for a hibernation file + 8GB for system restore. So like I do, I blow away the hibernation file, reduce system restore to 1% of drive space (there are ways of going lower), and set pagefile to 512MB to 2048MB range, and it never goes beyond 512MB anyhow.

 

I disable "system restore" altogether. It's never once actually served a purpose... for me. Hibernation, I disable. I only use Sleep mode or off. Hibernation is completely unnecessary with an SSD.

 

A shame that there's no method of getting Windows to put the system restore files in a separate HDD instead of the SSD.

EDIT: I'll get the screenshot tomorrow. Had to do some sourdough bread baking, and was somewhat sad when I bit into the bread. It was a bitterdough.

 

I never use system restore. It has always caused more problems whilst never solving any. So I just disable it on all our systems.

Yup, yup, yup. I had to throw that desktop together real quick-like back in 2010. So I just went with the bare essentials. I've added a few el cheapo upgrades since then but I didn't see the need to spend more on more RAM capacity. Perhaps that will be the last thing(s) I do to it is up the CPU when the go on sale for a $1, and get 8GB of value-ram for it. That oughta make for a slicker ride til the whole desktop goes up in flames.

 

My experience so far with ram requirements is that 4 GB is minimum for gaming (noticed fairly heavy bottlenecks at 2 and 3 GB), 8GB being the sweet spot and 16GB being future proof.

I've built a few systems with 32GB and 64GB, and even with heavy multitasking and gaming I didn't get more than around 12 GB of usage.

Ram drives are the main reason to get more than 16GB of ram.

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Unless you're running VM's. 4GB a piece when you're running about 5 of them...

 

My post was from a gaming perspective, generally you don't need to run VMs when gaming.

For non gaming uses like video and photo editing (among other uses), extra ram can come in handy.

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False alarm, at least for the single player 3 AI + me vs 4 AI. Maybe the RAM usage only spikes during the multiplayer rounds. But Wargame's multicore support is quite good. I'm using an i7 720qm (1.6 GHz):




EDIT: I'm going to play a 10v10 or 8v8 multiplayer round to find the RAM usage.

 

No, not a false alarm imo.

If it spikes at all - whether it is the game or the rest of the system that requires more RAM at certain times - then that becomes the new 'minimum'.


Right now, properly setting up a Win7x64 PRO system with 12GB RAM from the original 4GB, on a 3 yr old system with an i5 650 makes the setup usable again in 2013. The shutdown time alone decreased from almost two minutes to a few seconds (~10). And this is just for 'office' work - not gaming or other high performance computing tasks.

Download speeds are higher and more consistent, maintenance tasks (Windows Updates, virus scanning, backups, etc.) are MUCH quicker (updates/installs are at least 3-4 times faster...) and opening 'starter' 2010 Excel/Word went from a 90+ second ordeal to a much more reasonable 10 seconds (first run) to 2 seconds (subsequent runs).


And all this goodness for a mere $50 for 2x 4GB DDR3 1333MHz DIMMS, proper partitioning of the HDD and running PerfectDisk 12.5 Pro a couple times in online and offline/boot-time modes.


The measure of a cpu/ram combo is not what is good enough 'most of the time' - it is what keeps the system balanced and responsive all the time. RAM does that for the least $$$$ and is the most ignored part of a true 'performance' system.


My client will be ecstatic with his setup for many more years to come - if they had agreed to install an SSD too ($160 for a 240GB SanDisk Extreme was 'too much' for them!!!) - they would have had a 'current' system for office duty work into 2020+ too...


Curious to see what the maximum RAM usage will be during your play session - is there any way to test with 16GB RAM or more with the same workload too?

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My laptop is limited to 8 GB max, and RAM aren't cheap anymore, especially the 8GB sticks.

 

Wow! They have gone up considerably, $120-$150 for 16GB. I haven't checked in a while. Although I do have a good number of sticks, most I got for pretty much $50-$60 a set, plus some Samsung low voltage (4GB sticks), and some Kingston Hyper X 2133MHz (4GB Sticks).

Hopefully this means DDR4 will be here in the next year or so!

 

DDR4 is going to be absurdly expensive at launch, and is only worth buying for the APUs. Might want to wait at least a year.

 

Buying 'absurdly' expensive RAM for an APU is like buying Pirelli's for a Chevy...


See:
AnandTech | AMD's A10-5750M Review, Part 2: The MSI GX60 Gaming Notebook

Even if the performance goes up - APU's are still barely scratching the surface of 'performance' or real computing power. Not to mention that it is also holding back every other component installed on the platform too.

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The ram is mostly to help the gpu part of the apu, it doesn't do much to increase cpu performance.

In the msi review you linked, the laptop has a discrete graphics card and so better ram doesn't help gpu performance as much.

If you are just using the integrated graphics of the apu like in the first part of the review, then just by adding a second stick for dual channel you are able to increase graphics performance by 50%.

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