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4gb vs 8gb for todays games?
- Thread starter Sheikh
- Start date
....i have 64gb... you can do crazy things with 64gb.
i use it to open overly huge 3d files in maya blender or 3dstudio max. you can also render out poster size high res image files.
you can also do ramdisk.
http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/DESKTOP/RADEON-MEMORY/Pages/ramdisk-overview.aspx
i have installed tons of things to directly to the ramdisk and just never turn the machine off. there is enough ram that it is the size of older solid state drives. i have installed games to ram.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGOdymXxLQI
i use it to open overly huge 3d files in maya blender or 3dstudio max. you can also render out poster size high res image files.
you can also do ramdisk.
http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/DESKTOP/RADEON-MEMORY/Pages/ramdisk-overview.aspx
i have installed tons of things to directly to the ramdisk and just never turn the machine off. there is enough ram that it is the size of older solid state drives. i have installed games to ram.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGOdymXxLQI
Tsumi
[H]F Junkie
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Yeah, but between spending an extra $200 on the RAM or $200 on the GPU, what will get you better performance in games?
8gb is the sweet spot in price/performance. Infinite (well, at least high limits) budget builds need not care.
8gb is the sweet spot in price/performance. Infinite (well, at least high limits) budget builds need not care.
I have a question and this seems like an appropriate thread to ask in. I read a while back that operating systems include VRAM with all available RAM. Was that only for x86 or does x64 do this as well? Looked it up again through google, it appears that newer cards don't need it but does gpu ram still take up system address space. Not sure if I said that correctly since I don't really understand it. I am assuming gpu RAM functions the same as RAM used by cpu. For gaming I always thought maps etc, were loaded from hdd's to RAM, to cpu, then to GPU? Everything still has to pass through RAM before it hits gpu, cpu, or hard drives right?
Doomchoppa
Limp Gawd
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I believe that by 2015, one would really need to seriously consider 16 GB ram. I am already targeting it this year for my next machine upgrade. looking at mey Keyboard display panel which shows RAM usage, various games already almost maxing out that 8 GB. Most recently Titanfall (ofcourse some can argue that is due to a memory leak bug).
Tsumi
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This only really mattered for 32-bit versions. 64-bit operating systems can handle much larger amounts of RAM (something like terabytes, not sure). In the case of Windows systems, a 64-bit system can address up to 192gb of RAM.
That is not exactly how data transfer works. All data runs through the CPU. The CPU decides where the data goes, how to work on it, etc. However, during the execution phase, the CPU must be able to quickly grab the data. It can grab the data from anywhere: the internal cache (fastest), RAM (fast), or hard drive pagefile (slow). It basically needs somewhere to store the instructions to be processed. Same with GPUs. The processor sends the GPU instructions, but in the case of GPUs, the VRAM is used to both store the instructions and the image to be sent out. That's why in cases where the image size exceeds the VRAM (i.e. very high AA), there's significant slowdowns because the GPU has to compress the image to free up VRAM so that it can render the next part of the image. It doesn't render the entire frame instantly, it renders the frame part by part based on the instructions.
Again, it's about performance trade-offs and budget. Would a $200 RAM upgrade or $200 CPU/GPU upgrade net you more performance?
Sort of. Video card memory is mapped into the system memory address space so the CPU can write to it. With a 64-bit OS you don't need to worry about it as the system just maps ram and devices to different addresses and has plenty of address space to "see" all of it. XP32 has to cram everything into the first 4GB, so devices take a chunk out of available ram.
D
Deleted member 273615
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Is 16Gb really overkill? Just because it doesn't show that OS or programs are using it, the system still caches info into almost all the RAM available since Windows Vista days. Windows 8.1 does it extremely well, especially after the recent Update 1!
What is overkill today is insufficient tomorrow. The big question is will it become insufficient before you upgrade your system to DDR4? If you plan to keep your system for a considerable length of time, go with 8GB (or 16GB if you multitask heavily or use any applications that suck a lot of memory). If you upgrade regularly, it's probably not worth doing (as you'll probably upgrade before it becomes an issue).
That's the limit for Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Windows 8 Pro & Enterprise can address 512 GB; Windows Server 2012 Standard & Datacenter can address 4TB.
Tsumi
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Caching doesn't do much though, especially if you have an SSD. If you already have the RAM, good for you. If you don't have the RAM, you aren't going to really miss it, and it's not worth investing in at this point in time.
I don't see 8gb being insufficient until we're well in the middle of DDR4's life cycle.
For gaming and general desktop usage? No.