Ram VS Hard drive Space

[Wolf]

My friend always insists that getting another 512mb added to my already 512 is a waste of money because he says that 512mb is more than enough, as long as you have hard drive space.

I know they are two different things, but I just wanted to come here and make sure that I am right :D. I tell him that 512mb is decent but for Everquest 2 I want the full gig. He says it won't make a difference and so on. So could some one clear it up for me kind of, and reassure me that 1g is necessary for games coming out today and hard drive space doesn't matter much?

[Goldenpaww]

Basically games and most programs use ram to cache there files for faster access. 512 ram is good for windows and such, but with games getting over 2GB in size, they cache more to ram when running.

MMO's are bad for ram use bacause they cache most of the textures into memory since there access is random due to other players.

Norman games can cache, and un-cache textures as you go because it's pre-set so they know if your going to run into the texture again. It allows for better performance on slowwer systems.

All-in-all, I would say 1Gig minimum for stuff like EQ2 and stuff. i'm going for 2Gig myself.

[Devirka]

Your friend is wrong.

If you can aford it go for 2 gb of ram.

Also, not all hard drives are done equal, some read faster than others and that too helps performance.

[Holy Hippie]

Your friend is wrong. Memory and disk space are not interchangeable.

Say you have a computer running a game. It's got 1GB worth of data it needs to use to run that game. You can either cache that data in 1GB of RAM, where whenever it needs to access some of that data it takes a few microseconds to access; or you can cache half that data in 512MB of RAM, and keep the rest on disk, where it takes several milliseconds to access.

A microsecond is 1 millionth of a second. A millisecond is 1 thousandth of a second. RAM is *always* at least a thousand times faster than disk.

In real-time games, speed is of the essence. It's got to update the whole screen 30 times a second (or more), or you start noticing lag. Smart games try hard to work within the memory you give them, but if you don't give them what they need, you will always notice slowness when it has to access stuff off of disk.

Minimal systems these days start with 256MB of ram. You are better off getting as much as you can afford - at least 512MB, 1GB or more if you can afford it.

[Mutton]

I explain this one alot...

Imagine a guy in an office that works all day changing documents and moving them around. In this office he has a desk, a filing cabinet and a chair. Before he can do anything he needs to grab some documents from the filing cabinet and walk them back to his desk. At his desk he can arrange them without moving from his seat (he's neurotic and will only look at the papers while seated). If he has more papers out than his desk can hold, his only option to place the extra papers is in a temporary file in the filing cabinet.

Granted this is a rough analogy for how a computer works, but it's been most successful for helping me sell just about any computer upgrade. The guy in the office is your Processor, the desk is ram and the cabinet is your hard drive.

Yes you can allocate a large portion of the filing cabinet to store documents the guy is currently working on, but everytime he needs one of the documents in that folder, he needs to get up, walk across the office get the documents, walk back to his chair, sit down and do what needs to be done to the document before he can stand back up walk back to the filing cabinet to put the changed document back in the temporary file.

If the guy had a larger desk, he would not need to store as many documents in the temporary file and could just reach across all the papers in front of him and get what he needs. Reaching across the desk is much quicker than walking across the room. Conversly if he's not filling up his desk then a larger desk just won't help at all.

Now before anyone brings up cache, that also fits into this analogy. The guy doing all the work has two hands (I'm gonna make him right handed too, sorry lefties). With his right hand he edits documents, in his left hand he holds what is potentialy the next document. His right hand is the CPU's thread (if he gets stuck working on it then nothing else can get done), his left hand is the cache. If he has a larger left hand then he can hold more in it, so while it helps to have a large left hand it is more important to have an effective right hand unless you are dealing with large sized documents. Of course if you added a semi-retarded third hand that only works when the right hand is busy then you could call the guy hyperthreaded.

[kharny]

As all people above, though it might still be good advice to (also) get a bigger/faster HDD, depending on what you now have, since if you don't have enough free hdd space for a full install instead of minimum, there will be a third speed factor, which is your cd/dvd drive, which is a lot slower than a harddisk.

[Nulien]

For EQ2, there's way to not have a full install, kharny... the game doesn't touch the cd/dvd at all, after the game's installed. But for other games, you're right. If you have an option to choose either a full install, or a minimum one, full is always better... cd/dvd drives are even slower than hard drives.

[Satarus]

I really need more ram cause whenever I go to a new area in WoW that is going to load a lot of different players with different clothing, I am stuck trying to load those off my HD. BTW, I only have 512MB as well and its only PC133. I should probably upgrade to the faster stuff since I have slots for either.

[Galnor]

Mutton gave a great example as to what happens. Yes, your harddrive can )ans is) used as a temporary memory storage area. That is what the windows swap fine is. But, to give an idea of time wise why it makes such a difference.

Ram is accessed in nanoseconds, harddrive is accessed in milliseconds (A million times slower). So, using the file cabinet analogy, let's say it takes the guy 6 seconds to find the document he needed on his desk (6ns speed RAM). If it wasn't on his desk, and he needed to go grab it from the file cabinet, it would take him 6,000,000 seconds (6ms access harddrive).

6,000,000 seconds = 1666 hours or a bit over 69 days. So, by adding more desk space (RAM), you allow him to keep things around that can be accessed in 6 seconds vs. having to go to the filing cabinet 69 days away.

To tell if you need more RAM, if while you are playing a game, you see the harddrive being accessed a lot (after a zone load), then it is probably having to swap data from RAM to harddrive.

[Soulcollector]

MMORPG gameing = atleast 1024 MB RAM