Will it go better.

[Chizzle110]

Hey I just got 1gb of ram. I currently have 896 mb of ram (two 512 chips.

If i remove one of the 512 and add the 1gb to my slot. I will have 1466 mb of ram.

One?..

Will the game go faster?
cause even though i had 896 it was slow and jaggy. will it be faster?

[Syuusuke]

It should be, i mean 1466-896=570, that's more than half a gig increase!

[johnnyblaz20]

Wow. Somebody needs to go to school or i dont understand what you mean. If you have 2 x 512 in right now thats 1024 = 1gb. If you remove one 512 stick and add the 1gb stick you'll have 1536mb of ram = 1 1/2 gb.

Or do you have 3 x 256mb and 1 x 128 in right now.


I'd just pawn off your old sticks and get 1 or 3 more 1gb sticks depending on your mb.

But the more ram you install the better halo 2 will run. Halo 2 is a ram hog. Well its a system hog.

[Agamemnon]

"The game goes faster" depending on your video card, CPU, and RAM. Even if you upped it to 4GB of RAM and you still had a horrible CPU/video card it wouldn't do jack for you.

[Syuusuke]

Wow. Somebody needs to go to school or i dont understand what you mean. If you have 2 x 512 in right now thats 1024 = 1gb. If you remove one 512 stick and add the 1gb stick you'll have 1536mb of ram = 1 1/2 gb.

Well, his graphics card could be taking up some of the RAM which would result in missing RAM...which is also a lot.

Or could be that other one


Or do you have 3 x 256mb and 1 x 128 in right now.

[johnnyblaz20]

"The game goes faster" depending on your video card, CPU, and RAM. Even if you upped it to 4GB of RAM and you still had a horrible CPU/video card it wouldn't do jack for you.
Exactly. If anyone messed with their computer's score they see their computer's overall score is the same as the sub-score of the crappiest component
So... A computer is as fast as the slowest part in it. More ram= good but if your cpu or graphics card is a lower sub score than the ram replace that first.

I'm just using the Vista gaming score as an example.

and sorry for the common sence post.

[Mr Buckshot]

His video card is either integrated, or it's a low-end dedicated card that uses Hypermemory (ATI) or Turbocache (Nvidia), so it steals 128 MB of his RAM.

And johnny, your math is correct, but you forgot to subtract the 128 MB that's stolen by the video card.

Anyway yes, increasing your RAM will improve your framerate but if your video card is shit, the performance increase is minimal. You will have better performance in Windows though.

[johnnyblaz20]

He better punch that thieving video card and get his ram back. LOL

I don't think he mentioned if his graphics card is a ram thief or not but its probably the case. I didn't know they made cards like that, ofcorse i never bought a low-end card.

[Mr Buckshot]

He better punch that thieving video card and get his ram back. LOL

I don't think he mentioned if his graphics card is a ram thief or not but its probably the case. I didn't know they made cards like that, ofcorse i never bought a low-end card.

Almost every integrated video card except the Radeon Xpress models (usually limited to HP/Compaq) completely lacks its own memory - it MUST steal RAM from the system to function at all. And system RAM is much, much slower than dedicated GPU RAM, which further hampers performance. As for Intel video cards, fat chance of seeing even 1 kilobyte of dedicated RAM.

So about your punching - yes, if the video card is a low end dedicated card, you can alter the BIOS so that the video card only uses what's built in (usually 32-64 MB). If it is integrated, you have no choice but to let it steal RAM (you can, however, limit how much it steals - i.e. if you're not gaming you can limit the stolen RAM to 8 MB).

These days, basically every video card can theoretically steal RAM for its own use thanks to PCI-express (does not work with AGP or PCI due to the way they connect to the rest of the mobo components). If you look on store shelves, you'll see the Geforce 6200s and 7300s having Turbocache markings on their boxes. In this case, they will have a bit of their own memory (32-64 MB) built in, but will still steal RAM to increase the memory count.

In both laptops and desktops, integrated video cards will have no choice but to steal system RAM 99.99999% of the time. For dedicated video cards, the RAM-stealing is usually confined to laptops.

[johnnyblaz20]

So if i have more than enough ram i can integrate some into my video cards if if wanted? If so how?

[Mr Buckshot]

So if i have more than enough ram i can integrate some into my video cards if if wanted? If so how?

It only works if the video cards supports Turbocache (nvidia) or Hypermemory (ATI). These are standard in integrated Nvidia/ATI cards, but rare in dedicated cards. So if you, say, have a Geforce 7600 GT in a desktop, you won't be able to allocate additional memory to it because it has no Turbocache.

[demonmaster3k]

wow didn't know that integrated cards worked like that.
I have a similar problem on my laptop.
the videocard is an ati xpress 1100 series card. it has 256mb of dedicated video memory and steals 256mb of ram giving me a total of 512 video power. My problem is that the preformance is a tad slow on 3d apps. (halo has a fluctuating framerate, but my ping is fine) i get a vista base score of 2.8-3.0 (depending on the power setting).
my overall system has:
AMD turion X2 1.8ghz cpu
2gb DDR2 SDRAM
160gb SATA HDD
X8 dual-layer DVD drive
and the ati xpress i mentioned earlier (and no capacity for a full dedicated mobile card)

how do I optimize my performance for my card (i think it has hypermemory) so that my apps run faster? I think I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure integrated cards don't get eyecandies.

[Mr Buckshot]

You go into the BIOS and set the video memory such that nothing is stolen from the main system RAM. And the Xpress 1100 is just a refreshed Xpress 200 - so it can't take advantage of more than 128 MB. If it really does have its own video memory (though I have yet to see such cards having over 128 MB dedicated) then allocate no RAM to it at all.