What effect does extra Ram really have?

So, Im running SL on a laptop that probably has no business running a program like SL but when its all ya got you have to make do.

Its an
HP 1.6 GHz
504 MB Ram
An Intel video card(I know Intel and SL mix like oil and water, but its integrated into my laptop and there is nothing I can do about it.)

I was wondering if I upgraded the RAM to 1Gb and beyond would it really make that much of a difference for SL?

Personally, I think I'm bottlenecked by my video card.

You are, but you can only gain performance from more ram.

(By the way, you can tell that you've got a really scuzzy integrated video "accelerator" by noting that it's using 8mb of main system memory as a texture cache, which isn't exactly a high performance solution.)

Earlier I was running SL on pure Ram and processor.

What I fould was that you need a fast processor.

SL generaly only uses about 240Mb on my system, so 1G of ram would only allow you to have other applications open.

For referance I got about 12Fps using a 3Ghz P4.

I found setting Video card ram lower increased frame rate since SL would then lower the texture resolution.

Edit:
Dual bank ram (800Mhz FSB) and a large L2 cache helps too.

There is no such thing as 'extra' ram, unless it's not installed you currently have 512mb with 8 being allocated to your video card. If you go into your BIOS on boot up, you should be able to allocate more of it to your video card (usually up to 64mb in your scenario).

With that said, I'm guessing you're running XP? 512mb is the bare minimum amount of ram I'd ever trust XP on. You need 1GB simply for XP to react at it's normal speed, trust me.

I also run it on my laptop at times, which is a 1.7ghz Centrino with 768mb of ram and a Geforece 5200go in it. It looks like dog poo to be honest. My normal system is an X2 with 2gb of ram and a 7900gs, and it couldn't possibly look and run much better nor faster unless the Lindens did something on their own end to change that.

I just logged in and it's using 360 MB and climbing. Ah yes, upt to 400M now. Hmm, 415.

And my view distance is set to the minimum, 64m. (FYI, you can improve performance significantly by reducing this, it's in preferences -> graphics. The default is 96, IIRC.)

More memory = good. You'll wish you'd done it earlier.

FPS gain ? if you have to little you will get huge fps drop (secondlife? rarly much,cause it renders alot so fps wont be very high),hd swappning is awefull for performance

anyone who tried wow/eq2/vanguard with 512 ram or under know how this hurt fps

Ram relives the harddrive swapping (to much and some programs can crash on you) and puts pretty much anything the program uses in it , faster acess then having to load it whenever you need it.


512-1024 ram big diffrence, alot less hd grind
512->2048 ram,you wont be hearing your hd grind much anymore

Its easy to use 600-800mb ram in SL just up your view distance, and go near a crowd.

Anyone still on 512 should get least 1gig nowadays, youll notice diffrence to, tho if youre a gamer then youd want 2gig ~.~ new games comming need 2gig recommended

I started SL in v1.6 with 1 GB of RAM. As SL updated it got harder to run. I added another 1 GB and saw a HUGE performance increase.

A friend of mine had only 512 MB of RAM and had a tendency to crash after a while, as well as having his hard drive constantly work as "Temporary RAM", which any good PC Tech will tell you will shorten the life span of that hard drive.

I commend your offer of help to the original poster, but I would suggest that you actually do a bit of research about PC performance.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is not a slated amount used by any specific program. Running any intensive application (such as a game like SL) will use all of your RAM on your system in order to store quick access information. So the correct answer is "yes" more RAM = faster game speed.

I really have no clue how texture resolution even relates to video card ram? Texture resolution is based entirely on the resolution of your screen (windows display settings) and what settings you have selected in your game. Regardless.. the general rule is more RAM = faster speed.

Now...

To the Original Poster:

You need to identify the bottleneck here. If your laptop has an on board Intel chipset video adapter.. that is your bottleneck. On board video adapters are definately not made for gaming. Upgrading your RAM to 1GB will help, but not that much considering its your video card that is the biggest problem here.

Upgrading your video card may prove to be quite expensive since it is a laptop. Where did you get your laptop from originally? Do they still supoport your laptop , and have gone to their site to see how much it would cost to get an upgraded video card? Also, you may want to send your laptop to them and let them install it since laptops can be quite a bit more difficult to install cards into.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I do plan on upgrading my memory, it was just nice to know that it would make a positive change to SL's performance.

I know it will definitely help as SL is constantly using the virtual memory I have set up on my HD. I just didn't know if the change would be enough to justify paying for the memory.