In what way does adding extra RAM help PC gaming performance?

[Noir Angel]

Right, but I don't experience the page-file-using stutterfarks that having too little RAM would cause. So as far as I can tell, I have more than enough RAM for all the games that I play, except for, like I said, when I'm flying a jet at mach 1 and it can't load the textures as fast as I can fly. But that is the only case that I can think of when I experience the effects of having too little RAM.

Or is that a VRAM issue?

Depends on the game tbh. 2GB is right at the recommended minimum for most reasonably modern games, so it depends very much on the game. It's more likely to be noticeable on open world games. The level of fragmentation on your hard disks, the read / write speed of your memory and it's timings, the memory bandwidth of the video card, and the amount of cache on the CPU also come into effect as well. All I can say is that putting extra RAM in my system improved gaming performance a fair bit for me but of course the video card and CPU also comes into effect.

[bogas04]

Nice system :D

Not sure if sarcastic or actual praise.

[moeburn]

Not sure if sarcastic or actual praise.

You have the exact same CPU and GPU as me. Only difference is my video card is produced by XFX. (my system isn't in my signature but its in my first post. Sorry, it was not meant to sound sarcastic)

[bogas04]

You have the exact same CPU and GPU as me. Only difference is my video card is produced by XFX. (my system isn't in my signature but its in my first post. Sorry, it was not meant to sound sarcastic)

Yeah i read :D

[lol51312]

Performance

[I am Not PCyr]

Because noobs on Counter-Strike will run and hide under the bed in fear

when you tell them you have 86gb's of DDR6 ram and a 6,000 Terabyte SSD drive.

answer = ePenis

enough is enough after a pont your wasting money

whats enough ? check the system requirements of the game in question..

I say all this because i've talked to coworkers that think they are smarter than they are

and the proof was them bragging about how much ram they have..

for example the guy is telling me he had 16gb of DDR3

so what.. I have 4gb's

I can't imagine how this guy could find a way to use 16gb's for normal usage for games / apps

unless using some cahcing / ream drive solution or something..

my opinion ?

A great way to waste money..

[08993]

my opinion ?

A great way to waste money..

I hear this all of the time, for some reason if you are into building PC's and it's a hobby you aren't allowed to spend any money! It's all fine if you blow money on designer clothes, jewellery, nice rims for your car, new decking for your boat, new set of golf clubs or whatever but as soon as you spend on a PC it's a waste of money?

[I am Not PCyr]

adding more ram can makes things worse when i added more i had to lowr my overclocked ram settings down to stock settings.

Or i was getting random errors

This issue is not unusual eitherthere are topics discussing this at places like evga's mobo section

edit:

and my ram modules matched too the only difference ws the build date

[Descartes]

There isn't a game available on Windows that uses more than 4 gig of ram (that I know of) unless it's a bug. In fact, on Windows most games are still 32 bit anyway, which means they can't physically address even 4 gig.

Try APB Reloaded with less than 4 gigabytes. I dare you.

[Rigby]

There isn't a game available on Windows that uses more than 4 gig of ram (that I know of) unless it's a bug. In fact, on Windows most games are still 32 bit anyway, which means they can't physically address even 4 gig.

The timings and number of channels are more important than quantity. I only have 4 gig, and I've never once run out of space (I turn off the swap).

The game isn't the only thing that needs RAM. You're also running an OS in the background, and probably other programs.