RAM usage - 4gb vs 8gb

[kuzimins]

I have a question about something I dont quite understand. Now everyone recommends at least 8gb of ram, and i have 4gb, and I find it enough, because my ram never even fills up, theres always something left even when gaming. But, my games stutter a lot. Is that because I dont have enough ram? Does the system always makes sure there's something left so it is never full and games cant use it all?

 

Imagine there are two identical pc's, with identical os's and running processes. One of them has 4gb, and the other 8gb of ram. 

Will the 8gb one use more ram, even though it is running the same things, just to make the pc smoother?

 

 

 

[LemonSpice]

I have a question about something I dont quite understand. Now everyone recommends at least 8gb of ram, and i have 4gb, and I find it enough, because my ram never even fills up, theres always something left even when gaming. But, my games stutter a lot. Is that because I dont have enough ram? Does the system always makes sure there's something left so it is never full and games cant use it all?

 

Imagine there are two identical pc's, with identical os's and running processes. One of them has 4gb, and the other 8gb of ram. 

Will the 8gb one use more ram, even though it is running the same things, just to make the pc smoother?

Windows forces some of the ram to be opened up. The 8gb would be smoother as at 4gb the cpu is dumping data from ram to hdd or ssd

[VincentiusIV]

The OS reserves parts of the ram to different applications and components. When it has 4GB it will reserve parts of the 4GB to apps and hardware.

 

When you add another 4GB the OS can reserve more ram for the apps and hardware.

 

This stops when adding another 8GB (total of 16GB). The apps do have more ram reserved for them, but most of the time they dont use it as they often dont need it.

[Fate]

I'm using 3.3GB of ram just using LTT (I have 8GB), but if I got on my old netbook with 1GB of ram, it would only use like 700MB. 

[vern021]

I have a question about something I dont quite understand. Now everyone recommends at least 8gb of ram, and i have 4gb, and I find it enough, because my ram never even fills up, theres always something left even when gaming. But, my games stutter a lot. Is that because I dont have enough ram? Does the system always makes sure there's something left so it is never full and games cant use it all?

 

Imagine there are two identical pc's, with identical os's and running processes. One of them has 4gb, and the other 8gb of ram. 

Will the 8gb one use more ram, even though it is running the same things, just to make the pc smoother?

Try to run BF3 and open chrome with "some" tabs. It easily used up half of my 8GB RAM. It depends on how you conserve your RAM usage. 4GB is fine but it's much better when you have 8GB. Lots of headroom.

[Levent]

I dont know how 4Gb is enough for ya I only got few apps and DRM's running and I use 3gigs 

[Ren]

Your Asus HD7750 is probably holding your system back, depending on what settings you actually use.

For one, it's considered low-end (almost very low-end) by this year's standards. That's before even the largest price cuts happened. Secondly, I highly doubt that you wouldn't notice hitching and frameskip if you're playing with V-sync enabled and are below 40fps averages with moderate settings @ 1080p on many games.

I'd say skip the RAM upgrade, honestly. I still think that 8GB is very necessary. It's easy to see Windows and system services use 1.5-2GB by themselves. Add in games and applications and you've got very little wiggle room. However, the 7750 isn't a very good card, Asus sucks (imo and possibly many others' opinions at this point) and I'm almost positive you're overworking your card in one way or another.

The easiest route would just be to buy the $200 Maxwell (900-series) card when it comes out. I'm thinking that Maxwell has some good stability with it due to the power management and lower TDP. There's people complimenting the SLI scaling, there's good overclocks, low temperatures, less necessity for ultra-powerful coolers (600W-rated Windforce X3, R.I.P. brother).. I could go on and on about how far behind the 7750 is and why I don't like older architecture cards in general after seeing these results.

Try using MSI Afterburner and monitoring your RAM usage and what your graphics card is doing during heavy gaming. Keep the settings ingame conservative so you can actually see what's going on without 100%ing your GPU unnecessarily. Maybe after that you'll have a better idea of what you should be buying in the future.

[kuzimins]

Your Asus HD7750 is probably holding your system back, depending on what settings you actually use.

For one, it's considered low-end (almost very low-end) by this year's standards. That's before even the largest price cuts happened. Secondly, I highly doubt that you wouldn't notice hitching and frameskip if you're playing with V-sync enabled and are below 40fps averages with moderate settings @ 1080p on many games.

I'd say skip the RAM upgrade, honestly. I still think that 8GB is very necessary. It's easy to see Windows and system services use 1.5-2GB by themselves. Add in games and applications and you've got very little wiggle room. However, the 7750 isn't a very good card, Asus sucks (imo and possibly many others' opinions at this point) and I'm almost positive you're overworking your card in one way or another.

The easiest route would just be to buy the $200 Maxwell (900-series) card when it comes out. I'm thinking that Maxwell has some good stability with it due to the power management and lower TDP. There's people complimenting the SLI scaling, there's good overclocks, low temperatures, less necessity for ultra-powerful coolers (600W-rated Windforce X3, R.I.P. brother).. I could go on and on about how far behind the 7750 is and why I don't like older architecture cards in general after seeing these results.

Try using MSI Afterburner and monitoring your RAM usage and what your graphics card is doing during heavy gaming. Keep the settings ingame conservative so you can actually see what's going on without 100%ing your GPU unnecessarily. Maybe after that you'll have a better idea of what you should be buying in the future.

Yes, im thinking about getting the upcoming 960 or 950ti or whatever is in my budget. My current 7750 might be the problem, but the stuttering is more like ram fault, because even when the game is doing like 40-50 fps it can just freeze for a second. I'll try monitoring in afterburner, with lower settings.  

[Ren]

Yes, im thinking about getting the upcoming 960 or 950ti or whatever is in my budget. My current 7750 might be the problem, but the stuttering is more like ram fault, because even when the game is doing like 40-50 fps it can just freeze for a second. I'll try monitoring in afterburner, with lower settings.

This can be caused by your VRAM on the graphics card, by the way. If your DDR3 system memory were bad or not enough, I think you would notice more things being slow. If you play the right game, you'd see what's going on with Afterburner.

If your VRAM is faulty or isn't enough for the task at hand, you are probably going to be experiencing those types of problems (microstuttering and frame hitches). In which case, try to stick with my suggestion on the GPU. It may not be entirely about the amount of memory as much as it is you're demanding too much of it and it's too slow.

Also, depending on which model you bought anyway, I believe the 7750 sells as 1GB GDDR5 or 2GB DDR3 (could be wrong!). The DDR3 versions of cards are actually not that great, as in slower by a decent margin despite doubling the memory, so that may be the case here.