Affect of 4gig ram to 8gig ram upgrade on gaming performance?

[Pgeske]

I have the 13" base model macbook pro. I recently purchased two 4gig chips to replace my two 2gig chips (they should be arriving in the mail in a week or so). My question is: how will this affect gaming performance? On my mac partition, I primarily play Blizz games like SC2 and WoW (both run at ~60fps on fair graphics, although shaders/shadows must be turned down). I also do some gaming on my bootcamp partition (Windows 7).
Edit: Effect*, not affect

 

[GGJstudios]

I have the 13" base model macbook pro. I recently purchased two 4gig chips to replace my two 2gig chips (they should be arriving in the mail in a week or so). My question is: how will this affect gaming performance? On my mac partition, I primarily play Blizz games like SC2 and WoW (both run at ~60fps on fair graphics, although shaders/shadows must be turned down). I also do some gaming on my bootcamp partition (Windows 7).

Games are typically more CPU/GPU intensive, and may or may not benefit from more RAM. To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[Krazy Bill]

I have the 13" base model macbook pro. I recently purchased two 4gig chips to replace my two 2gig chips (they should be arriving in the mail in a week or so). My question is: how will this affect gaming performance? On my mac partition, I primarily play Blizz games like SC2 and WoW (both run at ~60fps on fair graphics, although shaders/shadows must be turned down). I also do some gaming on my bootcamp partition (Windows 7).

8gb RAM will bring your graphics from 384mb to 512mb.

That may help slightly but gaming is generally CPU muscle which doesn't change regardless of how much RAM you have.

 

[Bear]

Actually for WoW, going over 4GB will help. At 4GB on my iMac I had major paging and at 8GB no paging to speak of.