Is it worth getting 2GiB of RAM?

Most of us sit with 1GiB of RAM at the moment. However, people are looking towards 2GiB. Should you use four sticks or two? Will timings be affected? Well, the most important thing to think about is whether getting 2GiB of RAM will actually help performance. Corsair did some testing.

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We were very eager to run testing on Battlefield 2, as current user feedback indicated that this game performed much better with larger amounts of memory. As expected, the increase in memory array size from 1 GByte to 2 GByte had a very substantial performance impact on this game. We found that this to be the case regardless of processor platform, as well as regardless of screen resolution.

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Read the fll document from Corsair.

Two sticks, yes timings will be affected, and yes it does help performance in a number of games. Biggest one for me was Half Life 2 which happily bundles away loads of RAM - the result was much smoother gameplay and better loading times. Like silk it is now.

My timings are 2.5-3-3-6 for reference

Knowledge is power:p

I think the performance increase difference of Intel and AMD was the DDR2. It does show that AMD need it to beat Intel again.

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Originally Posted by Dougal

Knowledge is power:p

I think the performance increase difference of Intel and AMD was the DDR2. It does show that AMD need it to beat Intel again.

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No it doesnt, overall performance could still have been lower.

Interesting article, I think 2gb is worth it now :)

Pity I still can't afford it.... :(

Where do AMD need to beat intel? I thought AMD pretty much beat intel in all the benchmarks didn't they? (granted, comparing a FX57 to a 540 isn't too great :p).

The graph shows % increase in performance with 2gb, so intel benifits more than AMD on a couple of tests from extra memory, even if the performance is behind AMD still.

I don't think you can use the paper to compare AMD and Intel directly, but rather see what sort of performance benefit you can expect depending on your platform.

Shoulda said "between Intel and AMD".

I.e. the fact that Intel had a higher performance increase then AMD generally.

Certainly i've had problems with my system running 1T command rates with 2 gig - it just doesn't work with such low timings. It passes memtestx86 but games aren't quite so forgiving so i've gone to 2T which isn't the worst thing in the world. Gains can be had by ramping clock speed so mixing and matching can result in better performance - perhaps that's why DDR2 is starting to look good with higher clocks but quite (relatively) slow latencies.

Honestly, i can say that 2 gig makes some of the newer gen game engines a lot smoother as they've simply got more space to preload with. I quoted half life 2 because on 1 gig it uses ALL your ram (free mem went down to 1mb) and you still get horrible effects like the first time you fire a weapon there's a pause (as the sounds loaded at a guess into the memory cache) and the odd stutter here and there. On 2 gig that all goes away - as in ERADICATED which is great. This was true of my old AthlonXP rig with 1/4 of the memory bandwith of my current system too.
It's not as dramatic as 512->1gig but the benefit for new games is pretty clear, and i felt if i was going to go dual core i might as well have enough memory to run twice as much stuff at the same time ;)

I am getting 2gb RAM for the purpose of smoothing out BF-2 and hopefully being ready for future challenging games (F.E.A.R. etc :D)

I went to 2Gb on my last upgrade, BF2 is much smoother now.
Went from an XP64/3200w
KT800 Board
1Gb PC3200
128Mb AGP 9800 Pro

to
XP64/3200v
NF4 Board
2Gb PC3200
256Mb PCI-E x700

2GiB for a game to work properly? It's reasons like this I stick to console gaming. Why bother optimising the code when you can just blame bad performance on 'crummy' hardware?

(opens can of worms)

I've gone to 2 gig, but then again I don't really play that many games on the pc, so it's all about the photochop etc :D

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Originally Posted by Mike Fishcake

2GiB for a game to work properly? It's reasons like this I stick to console gaming. Why bother optimising the code when you can just blame bad performance on 'crummy' hardware?

(opens can of worms)

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Very good point, time for a new thread eh? :)

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Originally Posted by Mike Fishcake

2GiB for a game to work properly? It's reasons like this I stick to console gaming. Why bother optimising the code when you can just blame bad performance on 'crummy' hardware?

(opens can of worms)

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Just... slighty. It's not sloppy code - it's just that game resources need a heck of a lot of space thesedays as we all demand high res graphics and sound. It's only noticable on newer, more detailed game engines tbh - most older stuff will run very happily in a gig (often a lot less). I don't doubt i'll see high memory use for FEAR too but i haven't tried that yet. I've got a ikkle LCD screen which displays system info whilst i'm in-game and it's quite interesting to see what's going on with cpu load and mem use thesedays.
Consoles have traditionally had far less memory (for both system and graphics) and got round it with lower detail textures (see any console port and contrast it to half life 2). I think the PS2 had some ridiculously small amount of graphics memory available. But then, that's about cost - it's not cheap and they're trying to build machines for 'minimal loss' if you see what i mean. The new consoles fair much better memory wise and the '360 looks like it has a better memory system through unified memory but we'll have to see. Certainly it's going to be hard to judge when hooked up to a stock 4:3 TV which is what most XBOX players will have for the next year or two (until HDTV becomes affordable for the masses _and_ attractive to them).

Meh, cut the PC a break - it has to run all sorts of stuff AS WELL as a game :)

I would have thought a gigabyte worth of RAM would be sufficient at least until next year. Would two 1GB sticks (2 x 1GB) have a noticable advantage over two pairs of 1GB (2 x 512MB, 2 x 512MB) for the average gamer?

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Originally Posted by Mike Fishcake

(opens can of worms)

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*sound effect stutters as can of said worms is cached*