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Most Windows applications be them games or whatever  don't need 1GB plain & simple.

1GB is an optimal amount of RAM for a good spec pc  imo, roughly ,256MB is taken by XP leaving 768 for the rest of whatever you want to run. Usually ample.

If your heavily into video editing, then 1gb or more is indeed a bonus, but, I doubt most users would appreciate the relatively high cost of more RAM for relatively little improvement in performance, the "Bang for Buck" isn't worth it.

It's not that I didn't believe anybody when it was said that more than 1GB of ram is not necessary.  I just wanted to see it for myself.  I had access to another gig of ram, slapped it in and saw absolutely no increase in performace or FPS or image quality whatsoever.

It's 1GB of ram for me.  I'll take the money extra memory would have cost me and buy me some cool payware.

For those of you with more than 1GB and you only use your system for FS, you may want to reconsider.  I'm not saying...I'm just saying... 

I was the one that mentioned the 75 FPS. All settings were set at medium except the water effects which were maxed out.

I too  use my eyes to tell me if my system is working at what I consider good workable settings.

With everything tweaked to the max the FPS dropped to the mid 50s and the clouds took a beating.

I locked the FPS at 35 and tweaked from there. The clouds are looking better as is the ground clutter.

I agree that the FPS is a good tool to judge any upgrades or tweaks but hi FPS is not my goal.

I will admit it was nice to see the 75 after maxing out in the 40s with my old system

You guys are just jealous.

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Marick you can't brag about something you don't have yet  

Experienced PC enthusiasts shudder when anyone starts quoting "Alienware" or any other branded PC system. To us, it's like just handing over a lot of cash and letting someone else do all the dirty work without having to really think about it too much.

I would recommend Alienware type products to those who are too busy earning money and have limited time or ability to learn about PC's and hence build their own. Even so, it would be desirable to find a trustworthy person or firm who would custom build one to your needs.

I deal with an online store that builds the PC for a small fee when I order the components from them. It works out about half the price of an Alienware PC for the same specification.  But alas, you need to be able to create the correct specification and this takes considerable experience to be able to do properly.

More to the point of quoting you however, RAM, or rather, excessive RAM, really won't help in the slightest way to increase performance of a PC, contrary to popular (apparently) belief. Applications will use what ram they require and that is all, any excess is completely unused and is merely being "maintained" by the system.

Here in this Pic I am using task manager to quickly diagnose my resources while running a popular online multiplayer dogfight flight simulator.

It can be easily seen that my CPU is running at 100% utilisation, this compares with 1-2% when I shut the game down, so it's evident that I have a shortfall in CPU resource/speed. (CPU = 3.3ghz by the way!)

The game has paged over 430mb of data to my hard disk (for a total 544mb pagefile) as virtual memory, and has not used the available 364mb of ram I have in excess of my current requirements.

My system has only 1gb of ram, and so far, I haven't see an application use all of it. Future software releases could of course change this state of affairs.




Any inadequacies while using the software analysed here point directly to the CPU not being fast enough and not the RAM!

Testing my system using FS9 at my prefered settings shows 100% CPU usage as well, but I have  more RAM to spare with over 550mb unused in "my" default flight.
I've never seen FS9 use very much RAM (compared to some other current software), though I haven't made a big issue of testing it in all situations.

It's an easy test, and task manager is easily accessed in Windows. This is one simple way to make a quick diagnosis to see if RAM is actually involved in any performance loss.

What we can determine here is the fact that CPU's still lack the power (at least mine does!) to run contemporary software and still have a little power to spare if required.