| RECENTLY we managed to spend some time using a Vista machine. The machine had Athlon 4000+ and 2 GB of memory with Geforce 7800 GTX card. We installed a game and we didn’t have anything else than Far Cry at the moment. We wanted to check how much memory you actually will need to play games on Vista. We know it is a beta, but it will at least give you a feeling what could you expect from the final one. We moved the community with our story where we said you need up to 800 MB memory just to run Vista. You can read it here and we have to say that we do know the difference between page file and the actual physical memory, but trust me you need 1GB memory just to work in Word or Paint using vista. People were claiming that the machine used 400MB of physical memory but it will work like a beaten horse with 512MB. It works slow even with 2GB. Here is another cool shot for you. You can clearly see that you need more than 1GB of memory to run the game. Far Cry is not that an intensive game, and we ended up with 1.23 GB page file and you can see that we are running a single instance of Explorer and a task manager. 
I have a fear of FEAR the game as it will eat significantly more than Far Cry. We FEAR that you might need even more than 2GB as FEAR of already wants 2GB memory under Windows XP. It works with 1GB as well but it works better with 2GB, and so does the Battlefield 2. We are sure that you will soon be able to buy 4GB gaming kits, at least by the end of the year when Vista gets closer |
