RAM and gaming, Upgrade help...

[Xerco]

Hey im doing some upgrades on my comp which is going to be mainly for gaming. But I want to know how much of a part RAM has to play in Gaming...

I have a GTX 470 and im upgrading my mother board and cpu to Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz & MSI P67A-GD55 Intel P67 (Socket 1155) DDR3.

So i was thinking of getting the:
GeIL 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz

But its pushing my budget a little bit, and I was wondering if I actually need 8GB and if I should just go for the 2x2gb GeIL?

Will I miss out on big performance or will it not effect game play much at all?

Thanks for your time

 

[Serraph]

As far as I am aware you should be absolutely fine with 4Gb RAM. You only really need that much RAM if you are doing hardcore video editing etc. For gaming, 4Gb should be sufficient, however I am willing to be corrected.

 

[Xerco]

As far as I am aware you should be absolutely fine with 4Gb RAM. You only really need that much RAM if you are doing hardcore video editing etc. For gaming, 4Gb should be sufficient, however I am willing to be corrected.

Yah thats what iv been thinking, but I love to have everything maxed and my comp to be in tip top shape. So if the increase in performance isnt that great then I wont bother. But I really have no idea on how RAM is used with Gaming if used at all.

 

[Serraph]

Well as far as I know, the only RAM used by games is for the resolution of your screen, and by using high AA/AF (or so I believe). Primarily the Vram of the GPU is used for this, and if there is not enough, then it takes some from System RAM. However, I dont think that standard systems at 1080 resolutions, even at maxed settings, use a great deal of RAM, and certainly doesnt use the whole of a systems 4Gb RAM. I've heard people say that these special edition GPU's that come with 2Gbb RAM are poitless as a game will hardly ever use that much, unless on an extreme resolution.

Again I will stand to be corrected, but im sure 4Gb will be more than enough. Mine is never completely used.

 

[Uriel]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-6.html

According to this tomshardware article - more than 4GB RAM does improve things in games. It's not quantifiable in terms of frames per second but it can reduce the amount of popup etc and texture errors that occur during gameplay.

Summary and Conclusion

In a 64-bit system with a powerful graphics card, 8 GB of RAM really is a must if you're going to play demanding games. This is the case regardless of whether you're using 32-bit or 64-bit applications. However, even more than 8 GB of RAM can be subjectively noticed while playing. There is no real need for 16 GB of RAM, though. Going with 8 GB is quite enough unless you're running some taxing application in the background. We’ll comment more on this subject later, because the problem is often overestimated, as shown in our 64-bit gaming benchmarks.

 

[TrojanWhore]

According to this tomshardware article - Snip!

Cheers Uriel, thought I was gonna have to dig out the link

if you've ever played GTA4 at high res, near-max settings then you'll know it well....

driving at some mind boggling speed along a long straight, suddenly you're hovering four inches off the floor, which is a perfectly smooth shade of grey, then after a few microstutters the tarmac catches up with you, by which time you've hit a cop car, propelled yourself through the windscreen into an oncoming taxi, and died

used to get this really badly on my old system ([email protected], 4gb PC8500), not so bad with my SB (stock cpu, 4gb DDR3 PC10666 for now) but still there.
Gonna move to 8gb soon I think.

other games where u might notice it are RTS games (starcraft 2) when there are WAY too many units in battle, MMOs when hugely overpopulated, or minecraft when you blow up around 100,000 pieces of TNT in one go

also a few of the games coming this year look to be heavy hitting enough that they might need it (please Mr Yerli, don't push things TOO far this time )

Trojan