Is 4GB RAM enough for today's PC games.

[MxPhenom 216]

Originally Posted by Mathragh

4Gb is enough, but the gains in responsiveness with 8GB are quite high imho. Especially when you use a couple of different programs regulary and dont totally shut down your pc, but instead let it stay on standby.

With 8GB in my laptop, I notice theres almost never 'free space'(task manager shows there is lots of RAM 'available' but practically never alot of it is 'free'). Most of the 8GB is always being used as prefetch buffer which in turn decreases loading time for the various programs I use.

Especially when you dont have an SSD or very fast hard drive, more ram usually means quicker loading of random things that are getting prefetched.

So yeah, 4GB ram is enough, but more is better!

not only is it not "Free" is in the cache. which is waht Windows Vista did to the ram and made everyone think Vista was a ram whore

[The_Ish]

Originally Posted by thunderising

4GB better be, considering the "best graphics ever" games on PS3 come with 1080p 30/60fps and it has 256MB ram(system)

It's called optimization. Something games many times on PC doesn't have, because it's a port.. But that's another flame war

I've got 6GB, but the OS tells me all the time I need to close my games because there isn't enough. And i really try to keep all background applications, desktop icons (no, those won't matter i know, just illustrating a point here) etc to a bare minimum. Usually I can just close the warning and continue to play though.

[Mussels]

and if you ever look at a PS3 game up close, you'll realist the textures are incredibly bland and blurry - they just put a few crisp ones on the ass of whatever character you're looking at, and hide the rest behind motion blur.

[The_Ish]

Originally Posted by Mussels

and if you ever look at a PS3 game up close, you'll realist the textures are incredibly bland and blurry - they just put a few crisp ones on the ass of whatever character you're looking at, and hide the rest behind motion blur.

I owned SNES, N64, PS2, PS3.. But right now I feel that I will not buy another console until I get proper AA in games. That's what always get's to me. Bad AA ruins it for me. At least on PC I can buy hardware that supports it.

[FordGT90Concept]

AA is useless when you're running a high resolution on a high DPI screen. It blurs that which doesn't need to be blurred.

[The_Ish]

Umm no.. 720p isn't high enough for me obviously. And even on PC I need to max out AA or the jagged edges will make my eyes bleed (1920x1200).

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by The_Ish

Umm no.. 720p isn't high enough for me obviously. And even on PC I need to max out AA or the jagged edges will make my eyes bleed (1920x1200).

he said high DPI screen. 1080p on anything larger than 24" would need AA.

[Soylent Joe]

Yup, 4GB is completely good for a gaymen rig. DDR3 is dirt stinkin' cheap right now though, might as well go for at least 8GB, for the e-peen factor.

[n-ster]

to me, high DPI is more like 15~17" 1080p screens. I'm just waiting for freaking 2560x1440 on 23~24ish inch screens, 21.5 ideally. it should have been here ages ago

[eidairaman1]

Originally Posted by Soylent Joe

Yup, 4GB is completely good for a gaymen rig. DDR3 is dirt stinkin' cheap right now though, might as well go for at least 8GB, for the e-peen factor.

Dropped 8 gigs into my bros new machine even though win 7 runs fine on 1 gig

[InnocentCriminal]

Originally Posted by helloWorld

I like to play games maxed out at 1080p and I was wondering if 4GB RAM was enough and how future proof is it?

If you want more info on the topic, specifically for SB have a read of this.

[n-ster]

Originally Posted by eidairaman1

Dropped 8 gigs into my bros new machine even though win 7 runs fine on 1 gig

I dropped in 24GB of RAM in my PC even though 4GB is enough but I basically bought the RAM first and found ways to use it afterwards. Same thing for HDD space, I'd barely use 40~60GB out of 80GB on my laptop, bought a 2TB RAID 0 array, and after the firt month I had 750GB free space left, no I got 200 GB free space

[The_Ish]

Originally Posted by Mussels

he said high DPI screen. 1080p on anything larger than 24" would need AA.

Well, I'm clearly not aware of what you mean. I have yet to see a pc monitor or TV where no AA looked good.

[n-ster]

Originally Posted by The_Ish

Well, I'm clearly not aware of what you mean. I have yet to see a pc monitor or TV where no AA looked good.

I think he means that you don't need more than 2x MSAA until that, or at least that's what I think. some of the more modern games have some type of AA already built in so that helps too

[eidairaman1]

Tell u the truth i think the more ram the happier a machine gets but the other trouble is windows still relies on a HD paging file whether if a HD or SDD, cant put all paging into the Ram I guess...

[robn]

Originally Posted by eidairaman1

Tell u the truth i think the more ram the happier a machine gets but the other trouble is windows still relies on a HD paging file whether if a HD or SDD, cant put all paging into the Ram I guess...

Interestingly enough although Windows has given me a 24gig(!) page file for my (excessive, but was so cheap) RAM it doesn't touch it according to Resource Monitor. I've put it on an old 80gig IDE drive; the only file, and the disk sits doing nothing. So Windows isn't daft, it sees the RAM and makes the right decision.

On topic: 8gig is necessary for web development now days. Tomcat + Eclipse + 4 browsers + Office was killer slow on 4gigs at work. Bring up a minimized window and wait 5 sec for the blackness to fill in.

Best thing is my gaming machine can happily be my dev machine now, despite SQL Server and GlassFish processes running all day.

[eidairaman1]

well 7 will run fine on 1 gig so i figured to quad the amt he had previously which was 2 gigs worked out well