Let's Make A Rig!

[Vicious Horizon]

Sigh, if you want to get all technical about it =/

[Calneon]

Sigh, if you want to get all technical about it =/

I'm just correcting you .

[Colonel Mitch]

Sigh, if you want to get all technical about it =/

If you want to get all technical about it you need to understand what windows does with memory.

Windows has something called a pagefile, which is hard disk space that it uses as extra ram. The problem with this is a hard drive accesses hundreds of times slower than a ram module (also if your wasting HDD resources on page filing it becomes inefficient). A system usually has several Gigs by default, and windows only writes things there that it doesn't expect to have to access regularly, that way it keeps your fast ram either free to use, or caches things in it for quick use without loading from hard drive.

When a game stutters due to lack of ram (i had this on crysis when i had 2gb ddr3 and my 2 2900xt 1gbs) its basically that widnows has ended up having to move the game onto the pagefile as there is not enough free space left in ram, and when the game tries to copy data from "system memory" to graphics memory, its hundreds (literally) of times slower, not to mention if the game is trying to load and draw new models a the same time, at which point the hard disk is literally at its knees.

The problem I had was jsut the game worked fine in the first few levels, liek playable easily at max settings, but then getting to levels where theirs alot going on, it got bed every time something new was introduced, and at parts less than 5fps. On the final level on the boat it was LITERALLY 1 frame every few seconds, and due to the hdd being hammered the whole system took minutes (literally) to respond to any input.

The moral of the story is, so long as you have enough ram free to get your game running, everything will be perfect. If you go over WITH THE GAME, it will die miserably. If you go over with general applications but not the game, you might give your hard disk a hard time and loose a few fps to extra calculations rand ram operations, but youll still be borderline okay.