Does anyone know if increasing RAM will improve the fps of a game? I'm playing the very weird Allods online at the moment, but the game chugs a bit in busy areas. My graphics (onboard sadly, that won't change) can otherwise also handle the game, but this issue pervades and it's a bit of a shame to experience it. Is this a graphics card thing, or can it be addressed elsewhere.

It may.  But that depends on how much ram you already have.  If you have 1 gig going to 2 or 3 gigs will help.  If you have 4 gigs going to 6 won't.

Now the tricky part is if you have 2 gigs you are limited to 3 gigs if you are running a 32bit version of windows and going from 2 gigs to 3 gigs may not help the FPS problem you have.  Generally onboard video cards cause a bottleneck because they are sharing both ram and processing cycles instead of being able to handle all of it themselves.

If your game runs find 75%-90% of the time and it just chugs when you get lots of stuff on the screen at once that's something fairly common to most games regardless of how powerful your system is.  If that is the case upgrading your ram likely won't help.  That's a video card issue entirely.

I've got a gig already. It's just weird how things work, I don't think i will ever really understand computers. Unfortunately it's a fairly old pc by today's standards and limited in the options for upgrading. Even then I wouldn't know what to do. Adding more RAM (i could put in another gig for a total of 2gb) is about the limit of my expertise. There's really no space for a graphics card anyway, which is a shame.

The FPS of online games such as MMORPG's and such are often determined by the Load of Visitors On The Game Servers and the architecture they use there to handle that load...

A lot of visitors in a single game area means a lot of information updates going to, and coming from the server. It's almost an exponential curve. Also, there's the timing. If your update is late, then the combined returned information update from everybody else's choices in the game world is late as well, resulting in skipping, or lagging at your location...

Any fixes for this (With the exception of you using fiberoptic for your network connection instead of broadband) are in the hands of the game designer.


With a standalone game, running entirely on your PC, RAM is not so much a factor as the speed of your CPU, whether you have more than one core CPU's, and more importantly by the speed of your Graphics Card. 1GB is sufficient for all but the newest games and 4GB will handle anything out there right now. Having the best graphics card makes a world of difference for standalone games.

Many of the online games designed in the last year or so are being designed to put as much update information as possible on your PC and only transfer an absolute minimum, still though, it takes time when you have to bounce packets of information across 15-20 other computers to the game server, and then 15-20 back again, and coordinating that for 100 other people all doing the same thing.

Quote from: kryyst;372154It may.  But that depends on how much ram you already have.  If you have 1 gig going to 2 or 3 gigs will help.  If you have 4 gigs going to 6 won't.

Now the tricky part is if you have 2 gigs you are limited to 3 gigs if you are running a 32bit version of windows and going from 2 gigs to 3 gigs may not help the FPS problem you have.  Generally onboard video cards cause a bottleneck because they are sharing both ram and processing cycles instead of being able to handle all of it themselves.

If your game runs find 75%-90% of the time and it just chugs when you get lots of stuff on the screen at once that's something fairly common to most games regardless of how powerful your system is.  If that is the case upgrading your ram likely won't help.  That's a video card issue entirely.

Quote from: GameDaddy;372520The FPS of online games such as MMORPG's and such are often determined by the Load of Visitors On The Game Servers and the architecture they use there to handle that load...

A lot of visitors in a single game area means a lot of information updates going to, and coming from the server. It's almost an exponential curve. Also, there's the timing. If your update is late, then the combined returned information update from everybody else's choices in the game world is late as well, resulting in skipping, or lagging at your location...

Any fixes for this (With the exception of you using fiberoptic for your network connection instead of broadband) are in the hands of the game designer.


With a standalone game, running entirely on your PC, RAM is not so much a factor as the speed of your CPU, whether you have more than one core CPU's, and more importantly by the speed of your Graphics Card. 1GB is sufficient for all but the newest games and 4GB will handle anything out there right now. Having the best graphics card makes a world of difference for standalone games.

Many of the online games designed in the last year or so are being designed to put as much update information as possible on your PC and only transfer an absolute minimum, still though, it takes time when you have to bounce packets of information across 15-20 other computers to the game server, and then 15-20 back again, and coordinating that for 100 other people all doing the same thing.

All of this, plus your onboard video card is almost certainly sharing main memory with the CPU.  If you get another gig and up the video memory in BIOS, you may notice some improvements, but as mentioned, if you are playing mostly online, you will not likely see any real advantage.

I can't increase the amount of RAM the card uses in the BIOS, it tells me 8mb (!) is the limit. Obviously a card would be better, but it's not an option. So either i squeeze the most out of my system and make do, or i find a way around that, or I play something i can get to work. It is funny how some stuff runs fine and other stuff struggles. I can play LotrO just fine (using the basic textures), but around every Skirmish Camp there are missing ground textures (everything that's on the ground appears fine).

I will never understand computers. Thanks anyway.

8mb of video memory?  That's 64x less then what most semi-new FPS games recommend.  What games are you playing Doom, Quake 2?

Looking in the settings for the onboard graphics stuff it does actually say 128mb.

But in the bios i can set onboard video memory to either 1 or 8mb.

~shrugs~

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;372789Looking in the settings for the onboard graphics stuff it does actually say 128mb.

But in the bios i can set onboard video memory to either 1 or 8mb.

~shrugs~

If you have a board that is a few years old, that might be what used to be called the VGA mask or shadow mask or something.  I think it used to be something like page memory, so you would be setting 1 or 8 mb per page for the video memory, or something like that.  At this point, you would have to post a screen cap or something to show what you are looking at.