Will more RAM make a big difference?

[Zaelya]

Currently my vid card is 9800 and I'm packing 1gig RAM with Vista.  Will upgrading to 2.5gigs of RAM make a difference in FPS?  I know upgrading my video card will being about the most change, but more than doubling RAM should have an effect no?

[Jal]

2gb ram should be the minimum requirement for Vista any less ive heard of serious performance hits.  Your video card will be a big problem too if you want better fps the ram will generally help loading times and less thrashing of your HDD.

[EQAditu]

The amount of RAM won't directly affect your FPS ability.  It will however affect your loading times and general playability within the game.  With that RAM increase, you should zone much faster, and if you notice stuttering when you do certain things or turn your character to see new things, those will be greatly reduced.  The stuttering itself can affect average FPS, but it's a secondary cause.  More RAM will also allow you to safely raise your Texture Resolution settings without increasing stuttering.  The stuttering usually happens when things loaded by the game are not frequently used and go into your SWAP file instead of residing in RAM... when they are needed, it's slower to get them from the SWAP file and you stutter.  The Texture Resolution settings mention only your VRAM, but general RAM usage seems to increase as well for whatever reason. Given how EQ2 is very CPU based instead of GPU... it's a toss up on how much a faster video card will help.

[Armawk]

<cite>EQAditu wrote:</cite><blockquote>The amount of RAM won't directly affect your FPS ability.  It will however affect your loading times and general playability within the game. </blockquote><p> Transform them in this case. More RAM is 100% the best thing you can do. 1G is a minimum even in XP, upgrading to 2G is like a new PC for this game, more than 2G has little effect though in game with XP. In Vista maybe even more than 2G will have an effect.</p><p>A modern Video card will let you turn up the effects and textures etc. However with a 9800 card Im suspecting the rest of the PC is not so hot either, so no use putting too hot a card in, it will just move the bottleneck elsewhere.</p>

[Apocroph]

RAM is going to help you in more general terms.  As was mentioned before, Vista is a performance killer if you don't have 2GB+ in your system. As it stands right now, loading Windows alone is eating most of your RAM, so adding EQ to the equation is only compounding your problem. Bumping up to 2GB should provide a pretty good boost in general performance, but your video card will become your bottleneck after that.

[Zaelya]

Awesome replies, thanks to all of you! 2nd question now:  What's a decently priced Video Card?   I'm not looking to buy xGodCardx2000, something to boost graphics/FPS without resulting in me panhandling for gas money and eating sugar sandwiches in the morning <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> Again, much obliged to the helpful people in this community!

[Sta]

<p><a href="http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2412161&CatId=2234" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...&CatId=2234</a></p><p>thats what i got and can run it on the second to highest settings with no lag at all. also got 2 gigs ram 2.8 AMD athlon proc</p><p>nothing fancy</p>

[Darian]

Well I have 4gb and run Vista 64bit and still get out of memory errors if I have the settings (texture's and character textures) up past "high"

[lilmohi]

Paznos@Mistmoore wrote: <blockquote>Well I have 4gb and run Vista 64bit and still get out of memory errors if I have the settings (texture's and character textures) up past "high" </blockquote> That's probably either a vista issue or your vid card.  I have XP and 4gb and i can run at maxium graphics settings w/o stuttering any (much less errors) in all but a couple zones.

[Dragowulf]

<cite>lilmohi wrote:</cite><blockquote>Paznos@Mistmoore wrote: <blockquote>Well I have 4gb and run Vista 64bit and still get out of memory errors if I have the settings (texture's and character textures) up past "high" </blockquote> That's probably either a vista issue or your vid card.  I have XP and 4gb and i can run at maxium graphics settings w/o stuttering any (much less errors) in all but a couple zones.</blockquote>Not a vista issue. I have 2.5g of ram, with vista. a so so video card. i kept crashing in certain spots in neriak and darklight, so i turned everything down to the lowest setting and still crashed. by the way. if you put everything in "run in service pack 2", disable visual themes, and disable video composition you see a significant perormance in windows vista. if you do that and go to system>advanced system settings(left)>advanced tab>performance...you turn all those off when your on and vista runs just as well as xp. i do that but people think its too much of a hassle.

[Apocroph]

<cite>Zaelya wrote:</cite><blockquote>Awesome replies, thanks to all of you! 2nd question now:  What's a decently priced Video Card?   I'm not looking to buy xGodCardx2000, something to boost graphics/FPS without resulting in me panhandling for gas money and eating sugar sandwiches in the morning <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> Again, much obliged to the helpful people in this community! </blockquote>That depends heavily upon your definition of "decently priced." I'm running a GeForce 7950 GT currently and having zero issues.  Spent $199, I believe.

[Darian]

<cite>Dragowulf2 wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>lilmohi wrote:</cite><blockquote>Paznos@Mistmoore wrote: <blockquote>Well I have 4gb and run Vista 64bit and still get out of memory errors if I have the settings (texture's and character textures) up past "high" </blockquote> That's probably either a vista issue or your vid card.  I have XP and 4gb and i can run at maxium graphics settings w/o stuttering any (much less errors) in all but a couple zones.</blockquote>Not a vista issue. I have 2.5g of ram, with vista. a so so video card. i kept crashing in certain spots in neriak and darklight, so i turned everything down to the lowest setting and still crashed. by the way. if you put everything in "run in service pack 2", disable visual themes, and disable video composition you see a significant perormance in windows vista. if you do that and go to system>advanced system settings(left)>advanced tab>performance...you turn all those off when your on and vista runs just as well as xp. i do that but people think its too much of a hassle. </blockquote>Exactly, I have a 1900xtx which is still a great card and 4gb of ram running vista, and crash in neriak and darklight woods if I have everything turned up, same goes for some EoF instances/zones but don't crash anywhere else, theres definitely memory leaks in some zones that and the fact that  I don't think EQ2 can utilize more than 2gb of ram.

[Dragowulf]

its not your pc its the game.

[Siogai]

There's this little application out there called FreeRAM XP Pro, available from CNet, that helps monitor RAM and CPU useage and also will free up RAM that was previously in use by other applications but is no longer needed. Fun little app that I use when swapping between other games or applications and into EQ2, just to maximize resources available.

[Miss_Jackie]

I'm running at 1.5 Gigs of ram with a GeForce4 Ti 4600 (at the time of release, was top of the line card). With settings turned down a little, I get no problems unless there are a lot of other characters around me. Otherwise, everything runs smoothly. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />