C&C 3 and RAM - An Inquiry

[Rl'Halsinor]

Command & Conquer 3 is here and it is Christmas in March for me. Over at Gamespot they had a pretty indepth article concerning system performance and this game. Here is a link:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/61...clk=multimodule&tag=multimodule;picks;title;2

If you read it they at one point say that more than a gig of RAM is a waste because of the frame rate cap. But hold on, the conventional wisdom - and I think it is correct - is that a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM for gaming (though many still utilize 1 gig without much sacrifice in gaming performance -- depending on what settings you'll settle for).

Take a look at their system they are using. Wouldn't you like to have that hardware?! Little wonder they can play with one gig considering their video card and the cpus they used. Games are definitely making greater demands at both GPUs and CPUs which Gamespot's hardware can deliver.

But what about the gamer that has a single core 3200+, 1 gig of PC2700, and a 9800 Pro vid card? Or if they have a single core cpu, 1 gig and an x1300 or 6600 vid card. Is one gig of RAM enough? Wouldn't a lower end system need the extra gig of RAM? Afterall, RAM is utilized for more than just a game's framerates.

What am I missing or not understanding?

 

[Rackhir]

Command & Conquer 3 is here and it is Christmas in March for me. Over at Gamespot they had a pretty indepth article concerning system performance and this game. Here is a link:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/61...clk=multimodule&tag=multimodule;picks;title;2

If you read it they at one point say that more than a gig of RAM is a waste because of the frame rate cap. But hold on, the conventional wisdom - and I think it is correct - is that a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM for gaming (though many still utilize 1 gig without much sacrifice in gaming performance -- depending on what settings you'll settle for).

Take a look at their system they are using. Wouldn't you like to have that hardware?! Little wonder they can play with one gig considering their video card and the cpus they used. Games are definitely making greater demands at both GPUs and CPUs which Gamespot's hardware can deliver.

But what about the gamer that has a single core 3200+, 1 gig of PC2700, and a 9800 Pro vid card? Or if they have a single core cpu, 1 gig and an x1300 or 6600 vid card. Is one gig of RAM enough? Wouldn't a lower end system need the extra gig of RAM? Afterall, RAM is utilized for more than just a game's framerates.

What am I missing or not understanding?

It all comes down to bottlenecks. Your system has a couple of primary factors that determine it's performance and if any of them are wildely out of wack then your system can be crippled by it's lack in that area.

IE. It doesn't do you much good to have a 3 ghz dual core, SLI- 8800 rig with only 128meg ram.

Other than that if they are roughly comparable you have to push the system to a point where they all saturate and then your perfomance hits a wall.

If there is insufficent ram it can have a whole host of knock-on effects that can bring your system to it's knees. However more than is needed will have no beneficial effects. Having 20 gigs of ram doesn't help if you're only dealing with 512m worth of memory resident data and 512mb consumed by the OS. Since there isn't anything to stick into that extra ram to take advantage of.

If the system is bottlenecked on the CPU and GPU fronts, then having more ram may be irrelevant since it can't take sufficient advantage of even the minimum ram since it can't draw on or process the information in memory fast enough to take advantage of even what's there already.

What they were saying about the game is that it has a fairly low frame rate cap, so as long as you aren't trying to play the game with the settings cranked up to silly levels you can hit that cap even with fairly modest system hardware. They had to crank the resolution up to 2000 x 1500 or so with anti-Aliasing to get a drop on the frame rates even with fairly modest hardware. Keep in mind to be hitting a resolution like that you are typically talking about something larger than a 24" monitor.

 

[Rl'Halsinor]

So, if I am reading you correctly, a correct amount of RAM is important, but if my video card and cpu begin to bottle neck because the demands I place on them is greater than they can handle in information transfer, then all the RAM in the world can't help because the CPU and the GPU can't utilize the RAM. Right?

 

[Rackhir]

So, if I am reading you correctly, a correct amount of RAM is important, but if my video card and cpu begin to bottle neck because the demands I place on them is greater than they can handle in information transfer, then all the RAM in the world can't help because the CPU and the GPU can't utilize the RAM. Right?

Yes. Ram is probably better thought of as a limitation than a performance enhancer. All other things being equal a faster processor or a faster GPU will always result in better performance. More ram will only help up to the point that you have as much as can be used, beyond that it gains you nothing.

It tends to look like ram helps more than it does, because it can be such a crippling limitation if you don't have enough. The next step down in storage (typically HD) is orders of magnitude slower in both access times and throughput (amount of data/sec). So if you don't have as much could be used, the suppliment to RAM (your HD) will dramatically slow things down.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Yes. Ram is probably better thought of as a limitation than a performance enhancer. All other things being equal a faster processor or a faster GPU will always result in better performance. More ram will only help up to the point that you have as much as can be used, beyond that it gains you nothing.

That's a good way to put it.

A lot of people see a perceived increase in performance when adding RAM simply because a lot of computers got sold with an insufficient amount. Nothing kills performance more than when the system runs out of ready RAM and has to swap to the hard drive, but once you get past that point its a matter of diminishing returns.

Developers usually have a target memory footprint, and having RAM that radically exceeds that won't have a noticeable impact of performance. Note however, that if you are fond of running other stuff in the background, or task-switching between the game and other stuff, that more is definitely better.

The most memory-piggish thing I have now is Vanguard, and even that tops out at around 1.3GB used, leaving ~700MB free for the OS and other stuff.