Is 4GB enough?

[S_I_N]

I have had no noticeable problems at all but that is at 720p my crappy HDTV is only 1080i and Crysis 2 doesn't give me the option for 1080p don't know if it makes much of a difference in RAM usage in 1080p though.

I was running it at 1920 x 1200 fuly maxed out I didnt really have any issues persay but the small window that popped up but it did it in the background whilst I kept on Shooting Cell Agents in da noggin I knew it happened cause I got the ding sound lol and when I stopped playing I would see the message.was getting between 32 and 50fps depending on what was going on the screen at the time

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

I have had no noticeable problems at all but that is at 720p my crappy HDTV is only 1080i and Crysis 2 doesn't give me the option for 1080p don't know if it makes much of a difference in RAM usage in 1080p though.

720 is only about half the size of 1080

 

[SieB]

720 is only about half the size of 1080

I know matey but I don't think going from 720 to 1080 has any affect on RAM usage, SIN say's he had no prob with 4gb at 1200p as well.

 

[cerbrus2]

I know matey but I don't think going from 720 to 1080 has any affect on RAM usage, SIN say's he had no prob with 4gb at 1200p as well.

With the cost of Ram so cheap at the moment. Talking £40 for 2X 2Gig sticks. So may as well future proof. Wile it is cheap.

As for more than 4gig hurting performance WTF.

 

[SieB]

With the cost of Ram so cheap at the moment. Talking £40 for 2X 2Gig sticks. So may as well future proof. Wile it is cheap.

That's why I bought the 8GB of Mushkin Blackline from Aria for £39 prices have gone back up to £60 now though but still £60 for 8GB is still good seen as it was around £80 a couple of weeks ago.

As for more than 4gig hurting performance WTF.

Wat

I never said that I was just saying that 4gb is enough.

 

[S_I_N]

I beleive AlienALX said something along those lines. But iirc what hurts performance the most is using all 4 slots imho if you can do 8Gb in two slots it'll be da beez kneez

 

[Ya93sin]

Isn't 8GB in 2x4GB generally what people do? I guess using 4 slots might be normal if you've upgraded.

[font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]

6gb is now the norm. 8gb is recommended.

For a 'gamer' purchasing now then perhaps. But in terms of the market, a 4GB setup is probably the most common thing.[/font]

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

With the cost of Ram so cheap at the moment. Talking £40 for 2X 2Gig sticks. So may as well future proof. Wile it is cheap.

As for more than 4gig hurting performance WTF.

Ebuyer have 4GB 1333Mhz DDR3 for £25 - the sticks I use

 

[Ya93sin]

I was playing Napoleon Total War today, with a few mods and a unit size mod, used around the 5GB mark. Again for the majority of games, 4GB is fine, but still.

 

[alienware]

I beleive AlienALX said something along those lines. But iirc what hurts performance the most is using all 4 slots imho if you can do 8Gb in two slots it'll be da beez kneez

Very highly probably, yes.

The more lanes that need to be addressed the more seek time I would imagine.

I tell you what, though. I am beginning to notice severe flucuations in the way Crysis 2 performs on different PCs. It's incredibly strange tbh.

It could well be down to allocation and the use of virtual memory.

Ebuyer have 4GB 1333Mhz DDR3 for £25 - the sticks I use

And ^ that too. Today I found a 3DM11 benchmark on a machine that, by rights, should destroy mine. It -

I7 2600k @ 5.1ghz

Geforce 560ti @ 1050 or something mental like that.

DDR3 @ 2011 mhz

It just went on. Overall it was 10% faster than mine, and mine was -

I7 950 stock.

GTX 470 @ 755mhz

DDR3 @ 1600mhz.

I read an article recently that said that running DDR3 to 2ghz made about a 1% overall speed increase to the PC than running it at 1600mhz. You know? I can well believe that tbh. Most of this new fangled stuff that seems amazing usually isn't. I mean sure, going from a 775 DDR2 machine to a I7 machine with DDR3 at mental speeds is going to be very apparent, but things like massive memory clocks are a lot more subtle.

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

Very highly probably, yes.

The more lanes that need to be addressed the more seek time I would imagine.

I tell you what, though. I am beginning to notice severe flucuations in the way Crysis 2 performs on different PCs. It's incredibly strange tbh.

It could well be down to allocation and the use of virtual memory.

I think the newer revisions are designed to use all components to the max so any one of them can easily become a weak spot and pull performance down

 

[cerbrus2]

It was always my understanding that the more bandwidth the better.

In other words the CPU can read and write faster if their is more bandwidth. so 4 2gig sticks will be faster than 2 4gig sticks. As because you are using both channels instead of just 1 the CPU can write and read from the ram faster.

Same principle as 1366 chipsets with triple channel rather than duel channel. Increased bandwidth. means the CPU can read a write faster.

My theory could be flawed though.

Just think of the ram as a HDD. When you raid 0 a pair of hdd's thats like your duel channel Now if you raid anougher pair of hdd's And then raid those raids togeather so you end up with Raid 0+0 that will be much faster. However it is late and i cant sleep so when I read this back tommorow it will probably make no sence lol

 

[Lollipop]

I see where you are going, but if there is too much bandwith it will bottleneck and it will be slower

 

[KING_OF_SAND]

Man, what is it with Americans loving to have stupid amounts of ram?

Fact time. 4gb is more than enough. I use 3gb in my I7 triple channel PC and I have not run into a problem anywhere in 7 months of ownership.

8gb is overkill, especially for gaming. If you are crunching or encoding then cool, otherwise it will hurt performance. The more memory you have the more that needs to be addressed. If you a running a game that can hurt performance.

If you take a look around you then you will find that 99% of pre built PCs come shipped with 4gb ram. Simply as it's more than enough.

It actually made me LOL when that crazy bald bloke who reviews stuff was proud to announce he had 24gb ram in his gaming rig

Utterly utterly pointless.

4gb of RAM aint squat now. As said before Crysis 2 needs more than 4gb of RAM, and more and more basic programs will use more and more. Remember a while ago bill gates said MS will NEVER use more than 512kb, and back then people were thinking the same thing you are now with 1gb or ram being overkill. we are passed the point now of 4gb or RAM usage. Games will start using more, and more programs will start using more. I have 16gb of ram. i got a 15fps increase in C2 from my last 4gb of RAM. But then again i do A LOT of video work.

 

[dugdiamond]

4gb of RAM aint squat now. As said before Crysis 2 needs more than 4gb of RAM, and more and more basic programs will use more and more. Remember a while ago bill gates said MS will NEVER use more than 512kb, and back then people were thinking the same thing you are now with 1gb or ram being overkill. we are passed the point now of 4gb or RAM usage. Games will start using more, and more programs will start using more. I have 16gb of ram. i got a 15fps increase in C2 from my last 4gb of RAM. But then again i do A LOT of video work.

i totaly agree with you

(some people should get out from under the big rock)

 

[alienware]

4gb of RAM aint squat now. As said before Crysis 2 needs more than 4gb of RAM, and more and more basic programs will use more and more. Remember a while ago bill gates said MS will NEVER use more than 512kb, and back then people were thinking the same thing you are now with 1gb or ram being overkill. we are passed the point now of 4gb or RAM usage. Games will start using more, and more programs will start using more. I have 16gb of ram. i got a 15fps increase in C2 from my last 4gb of RAM. But then again i do A LOT of video work.

Well it obviously is enough because I have 2gb ram and a video to prove it

And 3gb is enough ram, because game coders are still making games to run in X86 which only uses about 3gb of your 4gb any way.

Maybe that's it there though? On the machine I have it on I am running 2gb ram on X86 7 pro.

Edit. I am talking about gaming. I already stated that for video editing/encoding and lots of crunching more ram is useful.

Yours,

Fred Flintstone.

I love rocks. Actually no, I like people that dig holes more.

Going back to your theory KOS let's put the record straight. It has always been recommened to take what Microsoft say you need as a minimum and then double it. So, in this case they are suggesting 1gb ram for X86 and 2gb ram for X64, as here, as on their official site.

So, doubling that would bring you to 2gb (which is why my 2gb X86 PC runs everything very well, funny that !) or 4gb for X64. And quelle surprise ! near on every PC for sale on the market right now, all apart from the stupid overdone ones (gaming I am talking about) have, no no, wait for it, 4gb of ram in !.

Putting eight times the amount needed in there is complete overkill and completely silly UNLESS you are going to use and adress it all, as I have said about three times now.

I clearly remember when 16mb worth of SIMMS were enough. More than enough. To be a flash git I put 64mb in my PC and it was slower than it was with 16mb, simply as the OS and every app you run needs to adress it all.

 

[KING_OF_SAND]

First point. The C2 specs you showed are BEFORE the HD/DX11 patch, ALSO the HD/DX11 patch ONLY works in X64. In fact it's rumored that Windows 8 will ONLY be x64. x86 is out of date and it makes PERFECT sense to ditch it. Sure you can use 2gb or RAM if you want a slow as hell PC to only do web surfing. or you can use 4gb of ram for basic gaming, or you can use 6gb to 8gb for high performance. The only reason developers still make x86 is because they know there are people with slow PCs (ie less than 4gb of RAM). If anything is slowing down advanced game development its having to create programs that stay within 4gb RAM.

The reason your PC is using 1.4gb of RAM is because Windows is working around your lack of RAM. Running windows with NO program running uses 3gb of my 16gb. and Windows runs A LOT faster than it did before.

 

[Ya93sin]

Windows adjusts the level of RAM it uses according to what you have installed. I'm pissing around on my PC, and the max it uses before a game is about 2.38GB, but on a netbook, doing the same things, same programs running, same OS, the difference being only 4GB of RAM, Windows uses about 800MB RAM for itself, which is way less than on my desktop PC.

Anyway, Crysis2 is a bit of a rarity, because it only works with 64-bit machines, and in the future you may need more. I can't remember any other game needing a 64-bit PC.

 

[SieB]

It's not the game that needs a 64bit OS it's the high res textures, you can still run the DX11 patch without the high res textures on 32bit and 64bit. And as said many times in this thread Crysis 2 runs perfect on 4gb of RAM and I know for myself it does because it's how much RAM I have atm and yes that is in DX11 with the high res textures.

 

[jonowee]

It was always my understanding that the more bandwidth the better.

In other words the CPU can read and write faster if their is more bandwidth. so 4 2gig sticks will be faster than 2 4gig sticks. As because you are using both channels instead of just 1 the CPU can write and read from the ram faster.

I understood it to more on the lines of PCI bandwidth. So for the sake of explanation, we'll use a hypothetical PCIe slot layout of 4 slots in one row. They are pinned from top to bottom for 16x, 8x, 16x, 8x; and your Northbridge/CPU has now 32 lanes of bandwidth between all the slots.

• So we'll start building the pressure, one card in top slot, running at 16x.
• Add a second card in the third slot, the chipset or secondary controller allows now split to 16x-16x (think dual channel RAM doing what dual channel does best).
• Now add in a sound card in the second slot, oh flippity, we've got no more spare lanes, now the controller halves the existing bandwidth to feed the new slot(s). The slots are now running at 8x, 1x, 8x, with 15 spares lanes of bandwidth doing jack all.
• Add in a RevoDrive-like device, now we get 8x, 1x, 8x, 4x, with 11 lanes being wasted.

• Now using the same slot-filling kit, let's try a board where the CPU-chipset maker was being a dick for this hypothetical and only 16 lanes total. So it becomes 4x, 1x, 4x, 4x, with 3x lanes usable.
• So using the 32 lane example, think quad channel; and the 16 lane example as dual channel. Performance for your GPU (also think RAM), will not suffer just two slots populated in that 16 lane board. But once you add in more cards (RAM), you are forced to split the bandwidth beyond ideal conditions.
• So with GPUs, PCIe bandwidth is up to pace with what the best cards can generate. But for RAM, like high end SSDs being able overwhelm SATA 3Gbps; the speed of data able to pass through means we need the bandwidth without pushed beyond comfortably splitting for dual channel.

Getit, get it? (your eyes must also be spinning at that text maze above.)

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Anyways for the OP, 4GB is fine for now. There is no need for 8GB, but if you're buying new RAM, 2x 4GB would be dandy if you want, or if you need it for stupidly big rendering or like me multitasking the s* out of the 4GB I have for use.

Oh shhiii.... did someone just use idle load and minimal boot requirements to prop up a case for a heavy workload?