Slitherine

Ok - since the inception of the PC, RAM has always been the main thing about gaming and most programs in general. The RAM is where the speed is at. A Swap Drive helps but without a lot of RAM you were chugging along.

Fast forward to the 2 GB ceiling of Win XP and I think Win 2000. It was not wise to invest in 8 GB of RAM as XP only used up to 2GB.

Enter Win 7. With the Pro and next step up you could address higher amounts of RAM. But did the games address that much?

So here is my question for Slith employees: do any of the games on your list utilize more than 2 GB of RAM if it is available and provided that the O/S will allow the game to access it? Or can games access more RAM on their own?

Here is my question for users (where the pedal meets the metal): are you noticing an increase in performance in gaming because you bought a Win7 or Win 8 PC with more than 2GB of RAM? Yes, processors will speed up your game play but nothing like being able to load huge amounts of bytes into RAM.

Windows manages the Swap Drive but I did note that programs like Adobe Photoshop allow you to set up your own Swap Drive space. Note: For this program it is wise to have its own partition and then leave it alone for just Photoshop. Ridiculous? Yes, but its not Adobe's fault. You need a contigious block for Photoshop because of the file sizes you deal with (or in my case when I am building huge map overlays for map work I need to keep on increasing the size of huge files by adding in still another area of map).

Would love to hear back from the community on this. Please: no suppositions. Just good hard facts. Do not speculate if it has improved your performance. If it was OBVIOUS please respond.

I can only speak really for the games I have written, but most would never come anywhere near that RAM usage. To some extent that is because we have to support older/lower end systems too and so tend to be pretty sparing of memory use (and anything that is iOS compatible even moreso).

Cheers

Pip

My windows 8 laptop doesn't currently have spare ram to study.

But my son has a rig that uses a solid state drive and has ram dripping off of it and he is using 7 and while it is clear the computer can turn on at the drop if a hat, it doesn't seem like any of his own games are performing in any fashion that is omg in nature.

Sooo that said, I would be rather shocked to hear any of our plodding dull graphically undemanding games were even aware more than 2 gigs even existed let alone use any of it when it seems like even mainstream gaming isn't.

I think the hardware has massively outstripped the needs of the games to a point, and the only things likely using all that ram, likely will have nothing to due with a game.

I have seen my buddy's rig multi task some incredible functions though.

DSWargamer wrote:I think the hardware has massively outstripped the needs of the games to a point, and the only things likely using all that ram, likely will have nothing to due with a game.

I'm afraid that's not correct. It's true that most 3D games are requiring, by now, only 2GB and recommend 4GB. But there already some games that need 4GB as minimum and I have even seen one already demanding 8GB.
I can see that in a non distant future some games will require as minimum 4GB of RAM. That will probably be the pattern.
Our games in Slitherine don't need those memory resources, so 2GB will be enough. But 2GB can be rather short for games and having OS and other applications running.
That's why all computers now bring 4GB minimum.

It's down to having either a 32bit OS or 64 bit..With 64 bit your PC can use more than 4 gig..Oh and 2 gig of ram using WIn 7 64 bit is a nightmare...when I upgraded to 8 gig it made a massive difference.