How memory affects games?

After sitting on 1 GB of memory for the past couple years, I decided it was time to up it a bit. My somewhat-aging machine's now happily running on 3 gigs of GEIL PC3200, and I was actually surprised by some of the results.

Straight-up programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, not surprisingly, start up a lot faster and seem to be able to handle working a bit better. But what really got me was how much better games run. Take Bioshock, for example: I tried the demo at 1024x768 (my usual gaming res), with everything set on medium, and all the whistle-bells turned off and the game was fairly choppy and not what I would call playable. But now after the memory upgrade, I can run it just fine with graphic details on high and most of the whistle-bells enabled. I always thought the videocard was the biggest factor in performance like that, but does it make sense that a system's RAM would make that big of a difference in a graphical sense, like that?

Obviously I can see the results in front of my face, but I'm curious if anyone has insight into why increasing the computer's memory would yield better game results, I guess. Like I said, it was a surprising bonus and I'm just curious as to why.

m19

 

I'm not 100% sure, but I can try.

With more memory, Windows doesn't need to use your page/swap file on your hard drive to store the least used data in memory temporarily. Since RAM is also faster than a hard drive, you allow the PC to not read and write to the hard drive as often, and when the game or Windows needs more data to process, it gets it faster then before.

And unless you're using Vista, your computer's processor actually does more video processing then the processor on your video card (At least that's how I understood the information I saw a while ago). So like I said above, it gets what it needs faster, so it shouldn't seem as choppy.

Hope this helps

 

Pretty much. The monitor shows you what is happening on the screen. Then it remembers that while remembering what you just did with the mouse, figures out what it needs to change in response, and then renders the results on the screen.

All of the above that needs to be remembered, while the CPU and GPU do their calculations, is stored in the RAM. More RAM = Better gaming.