Many gamers have very capable computers according to Valve's hardware survey. Not everyone has 3GHz CPUs paired with GeForce 7800 GTXs, but about 90 percent of all the computers surveyed have an Athlon XP, a Pentium 4, or better CPU. On the video card front, almost 65 percent had a video card made in the last three years.
In light of these facts, the information we came across regarding RAM was rather startling. Almost 10 percent of all systems surveyed have less than 256MB of RAM, and another 40 percent have less than 512MB of RAM. Combine these low memory numbers with the fact that around 97 percent of people in the survey run some variant of Windows XP or Windows 2000, and you have the perfect recipe for sluggish performance. Even though the system requirements for Windows XP aren't huge, a machine with the bare minimum amount of RAM won't provide for a pleasant experience, whether you're playing a game or just browsing the Web. Windows XP, and the associated software bloat that accumulates over time, will chew through 128MB, and even 512MB, of RAM very easily.
The cost to upgrade your RAM subsystem actually amounts to a relatively trivial amount of cash if you want to get up to 512MB. For $50, you can get a complete 512MB memory kit. If you already have a 256MB stick, adding another module only costs $25, almost half the cost of a regular game. Upgrading your RAM will improve the feel and the overall performance of your machine by incalculable amounts.
We run our usual test beds with 1GB of RAM. We only drop down to 512MB or lower when we want to see how games perform with less than optimal amounts of memory. We don’t even factor 128MB of RAM into our testing. Our testing has shown that playing most modern games with less than 512MB of RAM proves to be very difficult.
The difference between having 1GB versus 512MB of RAM in a game like Doom 3 is noticeable, but still very playable Note that Doom 3 requires a bare minimum of 512MB of RAM--it still runs with 256MB and 128MB of RAM. But the sluggish system performance, the way the game seems to freeze a little each time you turn a corner, might be scarier than the game itself. The results shown never stabilized, and the game was far from playable with this little RAM.
Doom 3 is known to be fairly hardware intensive, but even non-FPS games benefit from having more memory. The popular MMORPG World of Warcraft is notorious for its memory needs. If you want to have fun in Azeroth, you better have 1GB of memory.
RAM Performance
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Test System: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU, Asus A8N SLI Deluxe, Corsair XMS PC4000 512MBx2, Maxtor Maxline III 250GB hard disk , Windows XP Professional.
Graphics Cards: GeForce 7800 GT.
Graphics Drivers: Nvidia ForceWare 77.77.
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