March 1999 SDRAM Comparison

We've all asked this question at one point or another, but how much RAM is enough? The answer is entirely situation specific, however you can get a general idea on how much RAM you'll need using a quick benchmark comparison.

Today's business applications notice almost no improvement over 64MB of RAM, although there is a measurable improvement all the way up to 512MB of RAM, a difference of 0.2 business Winstone points is not noticeable at all to any sort of user. Business users will find that 64MB of RAM under Windows 98 is enough.

Using S3's Monster 2 Quake 2 demo, which contains an enormous amount of textures, running at 1600 x 1200, on an AGP TNT based accelerator, which in theory should require a heavy amount of system memory accesses to swap the large textures in and out of, the most noticeable jump is that experienced from 64MB to 128MB. Making a clear indication of a future movement to 128MB as a requirement, however you can get by with 64MB, even as a gamer.