Purpose of more RAM

Imagine a desk with a guy sitting at it.
Now this guy represents your CPU and he can work on any single thing sitting on your desk.
This desk represents your RAM.
Now if the desk is big enough then there is no reason why the guy can't work on photoshop (which is sitting on the desk) and then quickly switch over to Safari (also on the desk) and go back and forth as he wishes.

Ram is Random access Memory.
Ram is temporary memory your computer uses to store things you are working on for quick access later on.
Ram is faster than your hard drive so things you are working on are temporarily stored there so you don't have to wait while it loads.
The more ram you have the more programs you can have running at the same time.

Well, that game seems to be another half-baked OS X port so it will probably need more memory because of the Windows API layer overhead. Basically, the game is actually the Windows version and is packaged within a Windows 'emulator' that let's it run as if it were an OS X program. While ports like these do not have to be slower than the 'real deal' (some applications can actually run faster than on Windows), they often are slower.

Anyway, the Windows client recommended specs are 4GB.

I think I need a bigger desk.

I'll bite....

since so many here say: "Who would need 16 gig of RAM?"....

I compose (make music) large Orchestral "mock-ups". This requires huge sample libraries for every instrument in the Orchestra. Literally millions of individual samples get triggered to render a large symphonic piece (film music you do this a lot)

The samples obviously would never fit into RAM, so we composers buy super-duper fast SSD drives (500 to 750 read speeds) to stream the samples.

Here is where the RAM comes in.....

The very first part of each sample IS loaded into RAM while the SSD fetches the remaining part of the sample then streams it....

You use up 24gig of RAM in a hurry believe me.

I'm actually taking a step backwards by going to the rMBP since it only has 16 gig of RAM..I actually need at least 24 gig ;-)

best,
SvK

SvK said:

I'm actually taking a step backwards by going to the rMBP since it only has 16 gig of RAM..I actually need at least 24 gig ;-)

best,
SvK

Click to expand...

Then you might want to buy a uMBP-15 instead of the rMBP-15 so that when the 16GB sticks come out you can upgrade.



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NewishMacGuy said:

Then you might want to buy a uMBP-15 instead of the rMBP-15 so that when the 16GB sticks come out you can upgrade.



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Click to expand...

Too late ;-)
I'll sell my rMBP on ebay once 32g rMBPs become available and take the 800$ hit.

best,
SvK

I believe it says it would recommend 8 GB of RAMS if you're using a HD4000. Integrated graphic cards use RAM since they don't have their own unlike dedicated graphic cards. With 4 GB use have around 378 MB ~ 500-ish MB (forgot which one someone clarify). With 8 GB it is raised up to 768 MB on the HD 4000. More vram for the graphics card, the better (assuming the graphic card is fast enough to take advantage of that extra ram).

davyvfr said:

Why do some games require more RAM?

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Why do you think all games should have the same RAM requirements? They're not all identically coded.