Ive had a Gaming computer for a while with a good Grapics Card and high spec's. But for no apparnt reason its a little slow. In the PC Shop when i upgraded my Graphics Card he said its maybe a good idea to upgrade your RAM its currently 4GB if im gonna upgrade it should i take it up to 12GB or 16GB or even just 8GB ?
Answers (3)
Depends on the kind of game you are playing. GPUs now have appreciable (and fast) memory attached and the system RAM is often less important. However if you are playing the kind of game where there is a large "world" loaded and only bits of it visible at once, the rest of it is going to be either in RAM or on the hard disk.
Generally, developers tend to put in RAM what they expect can fit. It's why games have "levels". A level is an engineered delay to get stuff from the hard disk (or server in MMORPGs) and store it in RAM for the next level so everything looks likes it happens immediately.
The truth of it is that it's all down to what the developers think is an average gaming machine. I personally still think 4Gb is okay but I'd be moving up to 8Gb within the next 12 months and, if you can afford it, move to 16Gb now to give yourself about 2-3 years grace on memory. By then, the chips, motherboards, buses, etc, will have moved on and you'll need a new setup anyway. Might as well make the most out of the one you have.
Following on to Kangaroo's good advice, the average performance of gaming PC's as measured by Steam's rolling review has actually slightly dropped, of course it is skewed to their customer base but will show a overall trend.
As much as the games developers want/need to produce something better than consoles, they also need to sell to the widest market as possible ( pc market has slumped as most average people happy to move to tablets & share a PC, plus the economic climate as it is. Steam also noted that their survey included more laptops & oldish machines owned by people holding back up grading & the inclusion of people from the emerging economies.
Taking this into consideration, could we be entering a period of reduced game deveopment & need for significant upgrades?
Back to your up grade! I believe your best option is to go for 8 g of RAM of the best quality your budget allows that can be clocked to suit your rig, rather than 16g which games may not be designed to use in the next couple of years, (although this might give you the interesting option of loading smaller games into a RAM disc which might have benifits!)
You say that your machine has slowed down slightly, is this in boot up & loading games or in frame rates?
If it is the boot & load, have you considered adding a 128gb ssd. I have read some comparitive reports which failed to notice any difference to the actual gaming performance.
Hope this is of interest & help!
It slows a little on Start up but thats it. Thanks for the advice
A quick point to consider on your RAM selection, for gaming it is recomended to favour Latency over clock rate for the best frame rate.
Gaming is the havie processs which take more rame,processer etc and slower your system . First you should check your processer is good or not . If a hard-drive is long-term memory, then RAM, or memory, is a computer's short-termmemory. Data is taken from the slower long-term memory and streamed to the short term memory, which is where the CPU processes the data it's been given. Many people have been recommending picking up Samsung's new 30nm RAM , and it's not hard to see why. It's fast, inexpensive ($25 for 4GB), and draws less power than standard memory.
Grrrrr typing mistake thats not rame thats ram :s
Ok ill try nd go for a 16GB. Thanks for the Advice