Civilization IV, Baddest Beat of my Life

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A gig of RAM for strat games with lots of units, and RTS's, has been standard for years now, since well before Starcraft.

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Well before Starcraft? A gig? Standard?


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Heck yeah. Total Annihilation, AOE2, and CIV2 all needed as much memory as you could get, or you could expect pauses. Total Annihilation let you get up to 500 units per side! All 3d models. Civ2 was just a hog. AOE2 had plenty of units and big maps. You bet 1 gig was standard for a good experience. I noticed a HUGE jump in playability from 512 megs to 768, and a smaller one from 768 to a gig, but it was there both times. 512 was hopeless in many RTS's once you got online and were past the beginning and the unit counts got high.

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I seriously wouldn't expect smooth play out of any game these days with less than a gig of RAM, and that prescription goes back all the way to my Total Annihilation days in what, 1997 I think.

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1997? My god, what kind of computer did you have and how much did you spend?

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I don't remember what I was running then, but I've always bought or made computers one step below the maxed out CPU, which is always going for an outrageous premium even if it's just a little faster than the next step down. I think at the Total Annihilation days I was running either a Riva TNT card or the GeForce3 Ti500, can't remember which. Whichever, it was the top one at the time. Everything was pricey those days, too, but video cards hadn't hit the 400 and 500 range yet. I think they maxed out at more like $250. However, sounds cards and especially RAM were very pricey, as were hard drives and CD's.

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Edit: It came from Linksville!


[/ QUOTE ]I never click on unexplained links from strangers. Mommy warned me about those.

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i used to be really into computer games when i was 12-15 but now they don't do too much for me anymore. there are still some games i definitely enjoy but not too many.

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They'll always beat t.v. for me. Except for reading, I've outgrown passive entertainment. Oh, and the occasional movie.

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Edit: It came from Linksville!



[/ QUOTE ]I never click on unexplained links from strangers. Mommy warned me about those.

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A link to a system from 1997 with a gig of ram.

I really think you are misremembering dates. An average ($1000-$1500) PC in 1997 came with 16 MB, or maybe 32. High end systems more, but not 50 times more...

One or the other of us "needs" to go browse old PC Magazines.

[Blarg]

Total Annihilation was released September 30, 1997 and I played it with a gig. This was well past the days of 16 megs of RAM. You're talking about DOOM days, not Total Annihilation days.

Notice the machine you linked was on an EISA bus and used two CPU's, had a RAID controller with 128 megs of ram and six 4 gig drives. The last thing this could possibly be compared to is anything like an average rig or even a good gaming rig. As noted, it was a server made to compete with quad-processor machines.

You've misconstrued what's really exceptional about that machine. It's every last thing about it, to the extreme. But not really the gig of RAM.

[ThaSaltCracka]

Have you every seen Rambo 2?

In December 1997, 128 MB of SDRAM cost $655, it seems. Also, a friend of mine who has worked in the tech support industry since about that time thinks you're on crack. However, if your memory is clear, I will defer to you. God knows mine isn't. I spent a lot of late 1997 drinking heavily. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

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Looks like I misremembered. The motherboard you linked carries up to 384 RAM, so if that's from 1997, I couldn't have been playing Total Annihilation from the very start with a gig unless I started out on a lesser system and moved up to another one and caught a sinificant technology change as I kept playing, which I did for years. Not impossible, but who knows. At any rate, if I got up to a gig on that game, it looks like I didn't start at one. It came out almost in 1998 though and I played it to 1999 or 2000, so it's hard to guess exactly how high my RAM was during that time.

However, it's interesting to note that the 384 gigs that board holds in 1997 is still more than some games cite as their minimum requirements today -- and isn't Civ 4 one of them?

I do know that RTS's were my genre of choice, and I always eventually bought enough RAM so my machines were maxed out or pretty darn close.. And found I needed every last bit of RAM, and even that often wasn't enough to not have slowdowns and hitching, especially when panning. RTS's and and strat games with lots of units on board absolutely devour RAM.

If I didn't hit a gig at any point in TA, then it must have been either in TA: Kingdoms or AOE2.

[tubalkain]

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[censored] the haters. I laughed. I haven't played the new Civ yet, but I have fond memories of my Panzers dieing at the hands of ancient spearman from Civ3.

Also, this trend of posts consisting entirely of "*" is gay as hell.

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*

[astroglide]

want a prop bet on TA's memory utilization?

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Why would you think I would think there is any gamble in you?