1gb > 1.5gb in C2D MBP - worth it for games?

[Machead III]

Is it worth me buying a 512mb ram module for a C2D MBP with 1gb to improve game performance? Or will the performance increase be too small?

Any idea what the extra 512mb might translate as when gaming?

 

[MAcNIAC]

Is it worth me buying a 512mb ram module for a C2D MBP with 1gb to improve game performance? Or will the performance increase be too small?

Any idea what the extra 512mb might translate as when gaming?

save your money, an extra 1gig which also enables dual channel access gave an extra 1 fps in UT2004.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/247657/

 

[AlwaysRight]

I'm with MAcNIAC. Save and get the 1GB so that you will have dual channel. A 512MB chip will be worth nothing soon anyway so you won't be able to resell it for anything reasonable later if you decide to upgrade to the 1GB.

 

[Machead III]

Pfft, 1fps for 1gb of RAM? I'll probably stick with the standard configuration for the time being.

Cheers for the advice peeps.

 

[Zadillo]

Pfft, 1fps for 1gb of RAM? I'll probably stick with the standard configuration for the time being.

Cheers for the advice peeps.

That's in UT2004, which doesn't have such steep requirements. I wouldn't use the performance benefit in that to base a decision on. More modern games will benefit from 2GB of RAM, and some games really do require it for halfway decent performance.

When you see a 1FPS improvement in a game like UT2004 when going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB, it's an indication that it's FPS wasn't being limited by only 1GB of RAM in the first place.

 

[aog]

You might not notice a significant FPS increase in many games by adding RAM, some Windows games are very RAM demanding though, Battlefield 2 & F.E.A.R. for example.

 

[MAcNIAC]

When you see a 1FPS improvement in a game like UT2004 when going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB, it's an indication that it's FPS wasn't being limited by only 1GB of RAM in the first place.

absolutely the X1600 (fine choice that it is for a laptop), is a mediocre graphics card compared with gaming desktop graphics cards.

It is going to be the bottleneck most of the time in games on a MBP.

 

[Zadillo]

absolutely the X1600 (fine choice that it is for a laptop), is a mediocre graphics card compared with gaming desktop graphics cards.

It is going to be the bottleneck most of the time in games on a MBP.

Compared to a high end gaming desktop card, sure....... but it is a perfectly fine card. The X1600 would be a bottleneck, sure, but this has nothing to do with UT2004.... that is a game that performs well with much lower quality GPU's (I believe it even performs very well with the GMA950).

I don't think it's fair to call it a mediocre graphics card though...... for 15" laptops it's still one of the top cards, and we've already seen someone here overclock it to 520/520 and get a 5000 in 3DMark05, which puts it not that far away from the 6800GT in my PC.

 

[thebeephaha]

You might not notice a significant FPS increase in many games by adding RAM, some Windows games are very RAM demanding though, Battlefield 2 & F.E.A.R. for example.

Dear god don't get me started on how much of a ram hog FEAR and FEAR Extraction Point are.

 

[Machead III]

I do remember trying FEAR out on my iMac, and while that machine could get butter smooth FPS on Half Life 2 with max settings, even Full HDR, it could barely get minimum settings to run smooethly with FEAR. At the time I put it down to lazy engine programming, because I know a lot of work was put into the Source engine to make it run well and look good on all types of hardware, but this RAM argument sounds plausible.

512mb is a bout £35 these days, but I might wait until I can afford 1gb.