A question about Leopard and RAM...

[axiomission]

Hi guys, I just have a simple question....

I have an iMac 2.8 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM. Now, it's odd because when I installed Leopard (by the way, I erased and installed), the usage of my RAM skyrocketed. A whole GB of RAM was used for just using the necessities and some other apps like my web browser and iTunes.... It ended up with me having about.... 90 MB of Free RAM, 1000 MB of inactive ram and the rest utilized for what I was doing... NUTS!

When I had my Tiger, I had not experienced such a drainage of RAM like this before. I could run After Effects CS3, iTunes, and my browser with absolutely no question about the usage of RAM when I ran on Tiger. Is there a reason why?

Also, my experience with Gaming has severely dumbed down. To play just Halo, a nearly 4 year old game, it requires me to play on very low resolution and graphics settings. Otherwise I get a lagging performance. I have a Radeon HD2600. Why am I experiencing this?

 

[axiomission]

Hello??

 

[illuminous]

Hi

 

[Ctrl2k]

Leopard definitely uses more RAM for all its new features. I have noticed a decent chunk of active RAM that was not nearly as big in Tiger. It has an effect on my 1GB machine for sure, less of an impact on my 2GB machine, and my 10GB machine doesn't notice a thing.

As for games, I can't say because I use BootCamp for them. But other graphic stuff works well on my X1900 card in my Mac Pro.

 

[mikeepu]

My guess (concerning the Halo Game) is that
1. The version of Halo you are playing is the PPC version (thus running under Rosetta) A solution to that is to update it to the Universal Binary.
2. Even though the CPU you have is super. The RAM may be plentiful. The AMD/ATI Radeon HD2600 Is just barely a Mid-Range Card in comparison to AMD/ATI's HD2900XT (Even the x1900XT in the MacPro is a much stronger performer than the HD2600) or Some of Nvidia's G80 based offerings. So it might be a little to much for the HD2600 GPU to handle not only all of the graphical stuff that Leopard is offloading onto it, but also the burden that the game is putting on it. (Not to mention if the game is running under rosetta as well.)

Just a guess. Probably a myriad of other factors as well. Try the update if you haven't already (for halo) and let us know how it goes.