4GB of RAM in gaming laptop

It is enought for games or I need more?

 

4 is enough, but still a bit cramped if you ask me, 8GB is the current sweet spot for gaming, adding RAM afterwards is easy though.

 

4GB is plenty. Main reason everyone uses 8GB is cost. It's a very inexpensive upgrade. Now if you do heavy multitasking and then run a game with lots of programs, browsers/tabs, apps, open simultaneously, then it may be problematic.

 

4GB is archaic - you need 8GB even for gaming.

This article is from 2 years ago...

See:
Summary And Recommendations : Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM?


'work is done by the cpu in ram' - to increase performance then either buy the fastest cpu, or, max out the RAM your system supports (and a good compromise right now is to get 8GB as a minimum).

 

Its time to go to 8gb if your system will allow it, imo. BF3,for instamce, with ANYTHING else in the background, will eat up 4gb of RAM and start stuttering.

Sent from my Tricorder using Tapatalk

 

I would say it depends on the games you play. I've had SC2 balloon up to 3.5 GB RAM usage on a heavy spam map.

 

Upgrading RAM is cheap. Most 8GB sticks are available for under $50. It also helps immensely when doing video encoding/editing, etc.. That being said, you asked whether it benefits for gaming. Is that all you plan on doing on that laptop? Then I would suggest you first see how your games run on your laptop. If they give you frame rates comparable to what has been benchmarked, then you don't really need more RAM at the moment.

That Tomshardware article link also clearly specifies that "You won't see an overwhelming performance increase unless you're using very memory-hungry programs, but you will get a system with enough RAM for the foreseeable future." My Gateway from 2009 could play all games of today at the frame rates that they were supposed to run at on my GPU with 4GB of memory (systems those games were benchmarked on contained 6GB of RAM of more). Foreseeable future two years ago, would be now. So obviously they were a bit off on their estimate.

If you go to the previous page on that article, you will see that of the games benchmarked, only Half Life 2 (modded) showed any increase in frame rate. On the other hand, non-gaming programs showed a lot of increase in performance. Some here say it is only $50 (I hinted at that as well). However, it depends on person to person. I wouldn't spend $50 if it didn't help.

 

I wouldn't worry about it. Windows 7 is good at managing memory and ram. It will use up what you have available, so if you only have 4GB it's fine. If you have more, it will just try and use it, that's all. I see no reason why you can't play SC2 or BF3 with 4GB of ram.

 

I recently bought 8gb to replace my stock 4gb simply to use up an amazon voucher. I've noticed no difference in gaming, although I've not played bf3.

 

Ideal memory amount is 6GB ..
Windows takes 2GB
with game it is 1GB or 1.5GB more..

 

Windows 7 X64 takes up no more than 1.5GB's with programs installed. I currently have 4GB's and the page file disabled, and I have yet to encounter a problem.

I'm using 2GB's right now with 9 Chrome tabs open.

 

Okay right now on my Alienware, I have Dota 2 running, ~12 FF tabs, Skype, Steam, Trillian running, 26% of 16 GB used, so you can hit over 4 GB. And spawn heavy games, certain games can hit over 2-3 GB by themselves.

 

What most don't consider who recommend 4GB RAM as enough is that Windows sets up/configures itself and the programs it runs differently with 4GB than with 8GB RAM.

If you have a Win7 x64 bit O/S; 8GB is needed for the most responsive system today.

Will it make games faster (higher max fps)? Probably not - but it will make a difference if your games are running at the edge of playability (min fps) and especially if you're running a system with A/V software, a few web browser windows and other miscellaneous programs at the same time.

Running 4GB RAM today (gaming or not) is like running Win XP in 2012 because 'it is still good enough'. Both methods simply ignore the advances (performance and capabilities) that Win7x64 and 8GB RAM offer today.

 

Thing is ,that I realized that windows take amount of ram depends how much ram you have installed ..
I have 16GB and windows likes to sprawl across the memory..
It takes more than 2GB in my laptop.
Of course you need to have installed all updated all programs you need and what is startup like ..

Yes exactly
Remember guys ? ,when we had 1G or 2G when you installed windows xp all was nice and quite fast but adding more and more stuff system started slowing down and down.. soo many processes services. filling ram .. Yet if you have some reserve system will gets filled up but there is STILL plenty ram available so windows never slows down these days ..

 

Depends on the games you play. Barely enough for SC2 and BF3. Anyways RAMs are really cheap nowadays, I would upgrade to 8GB.

 

Bottom line is that when RAM was like $200 for 4GB people managed and made due. But now that you can get 8GB for under $50 it really isn't much of a consideration.

 

All newisch games takes same amount of ram .. so up to 2G so when i play game example max payne 3 i looked in task manager and had 3.60 (or something like that) used

 

Uh, no... they don't.


As mentioned: you're not seeing what the real RAM usage is if you're restricting your 'testing' on a 4GB system. Win7x64 dynamically configures itself based on how much physical RAM is installed. And similarly configures the programs/games you run on it.

(You cannot 'know', unless you 'do').

 

Whuuu?? Can you clarify?

 

Source for above quotes:
64-Bit: Memory-Hungry Graphics Cards? : Memory Upgrade: Is It Time To Add More RAM?



See:
Windows 7 memory usage: What's the best way to measure? | ZDNet


In the above article; the author states that Win7's memory management is rocket science (and unlike any other O/S - at least at the time it was introduced).

What Win7 does is detect what physical resources it has (RAM) and configures itself for the best operation within those limits. That is why Win7 can run (as optimally as possible) on 1GB systems and all the way up to 192GB systems - because it makes decisions on how to best use the available (physical) resources available to it.

With Win7x64 - the 2GB limit for each program is gone - each program can call as much RAM as required (and available, of course) and even when running 32bit programs in Win7x64 they can now use 4GB of RAM - double than in their native x86 environment.

Take all the above information together and you can see why running two or more programs simultaneously on a Win7x64 setup will be much, much better on 8GB or more RAM vs. only 4GB RAM installed.

The 'under-the-hood' mechanics of Windows 7 memory management can hide a lot of inadequacies (hardware-wise) of the system it is being run on. That doesn't mean though that a more fully spec'd setup won't show improvements to the user.

Even if those improvements are not in the almighty FPS that gamers are searching for, that doesn't mean that the other (game quality/responsiveness/multi-tasking ability) improvements are not worthwhile too.

 

tiller, was this in response to my post?

Still confused on how "Win7x64... similarly configures the programs/games you run on it."

Do you mean it configures system resources based on what is running? If so, then I agree whole-heartedly. Win 7 is vastly superior in managing system resources when compared to something like XP. Also Win 8 also seems to have made more gains, as all my Win 8 VMs appear to perform well above than similarly configured Win 7 VMs.

However, if you're saying Win 7 x64 configures my program/game, then you are mistaken. All Win 7 does is provide the environment, it is up to me as the programmer to code things in the most optimal way.

 

If I were a game producing company, I'd make sure my games run equally well on a 32 bit systems are those are the majority.

whether or not to leave browser with 234234 open tabs behind is up to the user.

 

that makes no sense, it's like saying you'd want a game to run just as bad as it would on an integrated intel chip on a gtx 680 because they are the majority.

Also, according to the results of the steam hardware survey, 64-bit installations of windows are the majority for any gamer that uses steam, which i would guess is a large percentage.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

 

Even my university uses 64-bit Windows on all the computers in the computer science department, and they are renovating the library with Windows 7 64-bit at the moment. And of course the Macs we have are 64-bit. So I would say that software developers are better off writing optimized code for the platform that is anticipated to be the majority within a reasonable timeframe (64-bit), while including support for older platform (32-bit) until its market share is at a good drop off level.

This argument can apply to many situations. If optimizations for older platforms and technology are priority, software will always be behind the times. USB 3.0, hdmi, thunderbolt, etc. All cases where the adoption rate depends on software and hardware prioritization.

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2

 

The thing is, 32-bit code is compatible with a 64-bit machine/OS but not the other way around. So if you're on a budget, developing for only 32-bit makes sense.

 

There are disadvantages of this like addressable memory space, memory word boundaries, on Windows using the WoW6432 subsystem, etc.

Actually if you are really careful and are a smart software developer, this isn't even necessary. Most code one writes is pretty much "bitness" agnostic in the first place. There are predefined code semantics that you can get around (ie sizeof) for 4 byte vs. 8 byte coding abstracts. You identify sensitive 64/32 bit issues and code around it with defines. Then all it takes to generate 64 vs. 32 bit apps is a change in the software compiler's flag. It doesn't take that much more effort.

 

no that is not what I said. Your example reflects huge performance drop from using dedicated vs integrated GPU, while mine reflects the observation that any current game can be made to run just as good on 32 bit system as on 64 bit one regarding the memory usage.

and for your survey, it also says there users with system RAM of 5GB or higher: ~33% . That upon your assumption that every gamer uses Steam, which is not the case at all.

also, 64bit OS users there: ~55%

P.S.
Speaking of steam, I do not like that it collects data of what applications are installed on the user's system

 

What's criminal are the new computers, particularly desktops, being sold with 32-bit Windows out of the box. People are going to start wondering soon why stuff won't run on their new PC.

Sent from my Tricorder using Tapatalk