Is 1GB RAM really enough?

[Flashfire]

Running this game in XP

AMD64 3500+
6800 GT 256MB
1GB RAM

Smooth framerate but choppy gameplay. Any suggestions?

[The_Abyss]

You will see smoother performance if you increase your RAM beyond 1gb.

[Flashfire]

You will see smoother performance if you increase your RAM beyond 1gb.

Would another 512MB do the trick or should I bump this up to 2GB?

[Goobers]

have you defraged the HDD lately?

anyway... as for your ram... you're probably gonna want to make it an even 2 GB.

i would assume you have 2 sticks of 512 now... so you'd want to keep it consistent, and add 2 sticks of 512.

if you have one stick of 1 gb, then you're gonna want to get a 1 gb stick.

and if your system supports dual channel, in this case, you'd see a huge increase.

[Flashfire]

have you defraged the HDD lately?

anyway... as for your ram... you're probably gonna want to make it an even 2 GB.

i would assume you have 2 sticks of 512 now... so you'd want to keep it consistent, and add 2 sticks of 512.

if you have one stick of 1 gb, then you're gonna want to get a 1 gb stick.

and if your system supports dual channel, in this case, you'd see a huge increase.

1 stick of 1GB

I defrag every time I install something (X3 just got here today so it's fresh).

[Scoob]

Flashfire: I have the same CPU, Video card & ram as you & X3 runs very well on my system. Yeah, busy systems like Argon Prime give a noticable drop in performance but it's still perfectly acceptable.

What I have that you may not is RAID 0 fast SATA drives, which I to keep fully defragmented using Diskeeper Pro (soo much better than standard defrag) also I use a small utility called System Mechanic 5.5 to recover & defrag my RAM before playing. It's usual for me to see only 12-15% memory utilisation before I launch the game - I hope X3 is taking full advantage of that.

The_Abyss: Will doubling the RAM really make such a difference? I know that having the hud on or any of the overlays such as sector map really hits performance especially at SETA. Would 2gb ram alleviate such problems do you think? I'd never considered that the overlays were particularly memory heavy hence the probem.

Scoob.

[Dunners]

1.5 GB should be enough. I upgraded from 512MB to 1.5GB (AMD 64 3500 with 6600GT) and my game is smooth with all options on.

Dunners

[lukethegordie]

is 1 gb enough? 8 months ago yes. now no

My BF 2 in max graphics runs choppy as hell on 1gb memory put another gb in and its running as smooth as a babys bottom. It wont solve all the performance issues but your harddrive wont keep getting drilled for info as much.

I always recommend 50%+ on the recommended ram of a game. this is just for windows processes so the game can use the full 100% of the recommended.

[mad mat]

I have 1.5Gb of RAM in my computer and turning off the shaddowing helps alot.

AMD64 2800 processor
1.5gb RAM
G-Force FX 5600
Win XP

[stevecs]

Besides just the general, more memory is better tag, If you set up your system without a pagefile (which really does increase performance) you _NEED_ 1.5-2gb of ram to run X3 or w/ the v1.2 patch it will crash to desktop. I have a system w/ 1GB (no pagefile) and as soon as x3 gets into heavily populated sectors the memory goes up to about 980MB used then it will crash with virtual memory issues. (by default this means that X3 is using at least 780MB as my base XPSP2 uses 200MB)

You can add a pagefile w/ windows (or by default you have one) and it will use around 1.5GB (all memory and about 500mb of pagefile). Depending on the speed of your disks this can be acceptable to you (but if you do this a little 'trick' is to set your min & max pagefile size to be the same (like 1gb) that way you won't waste processing cycles to contineously grow/shrink the pagefile which causes fragments).