Hi guys. My girlfriend is looking to upgrade her computer for The Witcher 2, and as usual I turn to my older brother for help. I'm always looking to buy more RAM, and he's always telling me I don't need it. My girlfriends pc is something like: 
 
AMD Athlon 64 2x Dual Core 5600+ 
2GB DDR2 Ram 
GeForce 9600 GT 
Win7 32bit  

And Witcher 2 doesn't run good. I know she needs a better grafics card, don't know about processor, but I would also think she would need 4GB Ram. My brother insist that the 2GB extra RAM wouldn't make a noteworthy difference(even with Win7 64bit), but on the other hand, I see people on the net talking about getting 8GB Ram or even more! I guess my question is, which part of gaming does RAM handle, and which games are RAM heave, which are GFX Card heavy? I see Witcher 2 recommending 4GB Ram, but I know Windows uses up alot of the available RAM, so how much does games even need? 
 
Thanks!

Dude all you need is a fast processor, nice graphics and 0GB ram.  Ram is pointless and a sham, yo.

I would upgrade that graphics card first. 
 
Edit:  You already said that, nevermind.  Adding 2 gigs of ram is dirt cheap, so I don't see why not.  In a slightly older system it can be useful outside of playing games anyway.

4GB of RAM is a pretty decent baseline. After that you won't see much of a performance boost in anything. I'd be more concerned with the processor and graphics card, to be honest. Both are on the low end for Witcher 2. You could probably ditch upgrading RAM in favor of upgrading those two, if the choice came down to it. I only use 2GB and get by just fine.

That's DDR 2 ram, 4 gigs will be better. But for DDR 3 ram, 4 gigs should be enough. Your ram is so outdated and so unpowerful, it will help but not much of a difference. But you should have 4 gigs already, since the operating system uses a certain amount of ram. Usually operating systems with 32 bit can only support 4 gigs or ram, not sure about windows 7 but I think it should be the same.
 
You should be concentrating on your cpu instead, also your videocard is totally weak.
 
Also even if you upgrade your videocard, you are still bottlenecked completely by your cpu, you won't see much of an improvement frameratewise.

RAM is a cheap upgrade, hell, I just bought another eight gigs to throw in my machine for a total of sixteen. Even being DDR3 it only cost me $80 and that's Corsair not some generic crap RAM. 
 
If you can afford it grab the extra RAM and upgrade that video card, I hear great things about the new 560's.

Edit: "Are RAM important?" - A question a child might ask, bu not a child's question! 
 
 
 
@Flaboere:  We need to know your budget, man.. do you have money to upgrade one thing only, or what ?
 But either way, 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM is the sweet spot for PC games in 2011.. DDR2 ram is weak now, and 2 gigs of it are barely enough!  
Oh and like Hitman said, make sure to install Win7 64bit rather than 32 in order to utilize the entire capacity of your RAM
  

@benjaebe said:

I only use 2GB and get by just fine.

Also even if you upgrade your videocard, you are still bottlenecked completely by your cpu, you won't see much of an improvement frameratewise.

Is Ram important

Thanks for all the good answers; I am however still very interested in which games, if any, are RAM heavy, or which part of games RAM are handling!

Most of the time ram handles loading, not sure about texture streaming or level streaming which I don't think so. Your operating system needs a certain amount of ram to run better. There is also Vram, for your videocard which probally takes care of the streaming. 
 
Gta 4 is very heavy on the Vram, crysis utilize some ddr3 ram. Still ram decreases loading time and I need to do more research on this particular topic.

RAM does a lot of things but you're mostly only going to notice it helping with load times. Regardless though, your CPU and video card are doing most of the heavy lifting.

@benjaebe said:

I only use 2GB and get by just fine.

For real ? 

At this point in the game, if you are gaming and using Vista or Windows 7, you need 4 gigs of ram,  Windows itself uses about 1.25-1.5 gigs on a fairly clean install and only goes up with the more crapware you accumulate. You can check whether you are capping your ram or not by opening your task manager while the game you want to run is active and see where you are at on the performance tab. 
 
The 9600 isn't the greatest, but if you aren't playing at high resolutions, it'll get the job done, I wouldn't buy a new videocard for that computer as it sounds like pretty much everything is out of date.

Most of the time ram handles loading, not sure about texture streaming or level streaming which I don't think so. Your operating system needs a certain amount of ram to run better. There is also Vram, for your videocard which probally takes care of the streaming.   Gta 4 is very heavy on the Vram, crysis utilize some ddr3 ram. Still ram decreases loading time and I need to do more research on this particular topic.

@Ahmad_Metallic: Actually it's my girlfriends budget, not my own, she's not rich, but I think she's gonna buy the GeForce 550 Ti, which she can get for about 200$. I guess processor will have to be next, but she's gonna need a new motherboard for that, so she's kinda holding out untill she get's some more money before doing that.

So there are people in this world with less than 6gbs of ram on their pcs?.

@groin: tell me about Vram then, what does it do?

I'm still using a rig that I built 5 years ago! 
 
So, 2 gigs of DDR RAM. I'm surprised it runs as well it does.

RAM IS important: increased stability, faster loading, etc.

@HitmanAgent47 said:

@groin: tell me about Vram then, what does it do?

VRam stores the textures, geometry, pixels, shaders, and many other things. 

I' say The Witcher 2 uses about 4 gb's by itself on full ultra settings, and texture pop in is non existent at that amount. So i guess that's the theoretical maximum, i run 8gb's drr3.

RAM is basically instant access hard disk drive space for the CPU. 
 
When you turn on your computer, Windows gets loaded from the HDD to RAM and as you open programs/games, each one of those is loaded into RAM, the more RAM you have, the more programs you can run at once or you can start running larger/more complex programs. 
 
Once you run out of RAM, Windows has to start doing stuff that bogs everything down like creating virtual RAM on the HDD which is always slower than regular ram even with SSDs. 
 
Faster RAM is nice, but it is absolutely crucial to have enough because the alternative is real slow.

@groin: you mean it's not all done by the gpu? I always thought geometry, pixel shaders and vertex shaders were rendered by the gpu on the fly.  edit: Are you saying the textures goes from the DDR 3 ram to the Vram too? that's sort of unefficient.

I have 8 gigs of ram and am loving it. Although with the rig spec the OP posted, Ram shouldn't be the 1st priority. 

@groin: one more question, your basically updating my understanding. Tell me more about the cpu's role into this process. Where does it start from, I guess the hardrive to the ram, cpu then the vram which is then rendered in the gpu to your display? I like to know the cpu's role in all of this, I know the cpu helps with framerates or reduce bottlenecking, not sure how much graphical assets and textures it has to deal with, maybe it's directly from the ram, to the vram, to the gpu and to the display. What's your background? you study computer science? game developer?  Edit: your also talking about level streaming right? what you can see, it's probally offloaded in the ram and streamed when necessary depending on the draw distance set by the game's console.

So there are people in this world with less than 6gbs of ram on their pcs?.

@HitmanAgent47 said:

@groin: one more question, your basically updating my understanding. Tell me more about the cpu's role into this process. Where does it start from, I guess the hardrive to the ram, cpu then the vram which is then rendered in the gpu to your display? I like to know the cpu's role in all of this, I know the cpu helps with framerates or reduce bottlenecking, not sure how much graphical assets and textures it has to deal with, maybe it's directly from the ram, to the vram, to the gpu and to the display. What's your background? you study computer science? game developer?  Edit: your also talking about level streaming right? what you can see, it's probally offloaded in the ram and streamed when necessary depending on the draw distance set by the game's console.

The CPU is basically the train conductor that is shoveling coal into the train's (metaphor for GPU) engine. The GPU does most of the work but the CPU gives it data to work with. Yes, I studied computer science and work as a programmer (not a game developer though). I have done game dev as a hobby.

@Rattle618 said:

So there are people in this world with less than 6gbs of ram on their pcs?.

You rascal. 
 
 
 
@groin said:

@HitmanAgent47 said:

@groin: one more question, your basically updating my understanding. Tell me more about the cpu's role into this process. Where does it start from, I guess the hardrive to the ram, cpu then the vram which is then rendered in the gpu to your display? I like to know the cpu's role in all of this, I know the cpu helps with framerates or reduce bottlenecking, not sure how much graphical assets and textures it has to deal with, maybe it's directly from the ram, to the vram, to the gpu and to the display. What's your background? you study computer science? game developer?  Edit: your also talking about level streaming right? what you can see, it's probally offloaded in the ram and streamed when necessary depending on the draw distance set by the game's console.

The CPU is basically the train conductor that is shoveling coal into the train's (metaphor for GPU) engine. The GPU does most of the work but the CPU gives it data to work with. Yes, I studied computer science and work as a programmer (not a game developer though). I have done game dev as a hobby.

so why does a CPU do all the work when the game is poorly optimized? how does poor optimization give the coal shoveler more work ?

@Flaboere said:

Hi guys. My girlfriend is looking to upgrade her computer for The Witcher 2, and as usual I turn to my older brother for help. I'm always looking to buy more RAM, and he's always telling me I don't need it. My girlfriends pc is something like: AMD Athlon 64 2x Dual Core 5600+ 2GB DDR2 Ram GeForce 9600 GT Win7 32bit And Witcher 2 doesn't run good. I know she needs a better grafics card, don't know about processor, but I would also think she would need 4GB Ram. My brother insist that the 2GB extra RAM wouldn't make a noteworthy difference(even with Win7 64bit), but on the other hand, I see people on the net talking about getting 8GB Ram or even more! I guess my question is, which part of gaming does RAM handle, and which games are RAM heave, which are GFX Card heavy? I see Witcher 2 recommending 4GB Ram, but I know Windows uses up alot of the available RAM, so how much does games even need? Thanks!

You need a modern processor like an Intel i7 or at least an AMD Phenom X6, a modern video card such as a GeForce 4xx series(or higher) or an AMD equivalent. I'd also go with absolutely no less than 4 GB of DDR3 ram. You will of course need to buy a whole new motherboard and power supply to support all that. In other words your computer is too old to invest money in upgrades. It would be a better cost/performance ratio if you just built a new one.