Eyefinity 8Gb RAM vs 16Gb.... Will there be a difference

[sparx1981]

Hi people,

I currently have 8GB of Ram and was wondering if 16GB will give me any benefit when I'm gaming using eyefinity. I currently game at 6256 x 1152 and all settings on max.

I understand that more RAM is better for multi tasking and caching but wondering if perhaps fps may improve due to textures being stored in the extra ram?

Thanks

[Delphium]

I dont think you will experience much i any difference at all.

I upgraded from 6gb to 12gb, there is little to no difference with games and eyefinity, but I did not invest in the extra RAM to aid this, I do a lot of work with virtual machines and thus needed it, it did not improve my game results.

[Wijkert]

The amount off ram doesn't influence fps. It is used to temporarily store data so it can be accessed faster then reading it of a hdd. This goes for ram on videocards as well, although that memory is used to store frames and such. At larger resolution it is possible beneficial to have more then the usual 1gb of ram on your videocard, but that doesn't relate to working memory. I have 8gb myself and have not seen more then 60% used at one single time. So in new games more then 4gb (game+os+other programs) can be used although those games are rare (e.g. Battlefield 3), but more then 8gb is currently useless when gaming is concerned.

[Abram]

Well.. RAM amount makes a noticeable difference in FPS if start off with something really low, like 2gb... but that's uncommon, these days. And while going from 4gb to 8gb (or beyond) won't really give a meaningful boost in FPS, it WILL load games a little faster, which is always a benefit in MP.

And hey, a bit more RAM never really hurts.

[PwrUsr]

From personal experience I can attest to the fact that anything over 4GB really does not improve in-game FPS, and same goes for SSD.

What you will get from 8GB to 16GB is *perhaps* faster loading, better multitasking capability, higher responsiveness in memory intensive applications (like movie/photo editing, rendering etc.) and maybe an overall "snappier" Windows experience if you really stress it hard. Ifgame FPS is what you're looking for, RAM is really not where your money should go...

VRAM is a whole other story, and if you're running very high AA/AF and/or very high res (as in over 1920x1080) then GPU memory will definitely make a noticeable impact on performance. I'm running Eyefinity @5760x1080 and upgrading from a 1GB card to 2GB made things much, much smoother. Going from 4GB DDR2 to 8GB DDR3 and adding an SSD on the other hand did nothing.