How much RAM do you really need?

[icbrkr]

I've been getting ready to upgrade my A3000 with a nice accelerator, adding 128MB of RAM, etc and then it hit me.  Really, how much memory do you possibly need for normal use on a miggy?  My A1200 has 32MB and even if I open all my normal programs (IBrowse, Genesis, Diskmaster, IRC proggy and lots of windows), I only get it down to 25MB or so free.  What's your current RAM usage?

[itix]

I used to have 128MB on my A1200/BPPC. It is useful for ShapeShifter, large ram disk, MorphOS, compiling large projects with GCC.

[stefcep]

I have an A4000 with 68060 and 128 meg, and a graphics card.  The graphics card uses some of the 128 meg to store video info.  I have never used 128 meg though but i could do it if I set up a large cache for Ibrowse or for burning cd's as a buffer or for an emulator like shapeshifter.  But most Amiga software will not need anywhere near as much memory.  I think you could even get by comfortably with 16 meg

[kd7ota]

I always used 32mb of ram, and always had about 24mb opened up after using it.  If you do heavier projects, then the more memory, the better.  :-)

[X-ray]

Back in the day I used to make long animations that I played from RAM through Scala and then genlocked onto video tape. Some of the animations were Vista Fly-throughs but most were raytraces. The biggest single animation I made was about 119mb and I slapped that in RAM because I had a full Cyberstorm card.
If I go back to that as a hobby I will have enough RAM to make quite a big animation because I have finally sorted out my PPC SIMM problem. So now I have the 128 on the PPC card, another 128 on a DKB3128 board, plus the 16 on the mobo. That's quite a bit.
By the way, raytracing with Cinema4D and high detail / polygon counts SUCKS UP the RAM. You think 128mb is a lot, it isn't. I got out of memory errors many a time with only 128mb.
On the PC side, Cinema 4D has soaked up 580mb of RAM all on its own, so the Amiga is still a very memory-friendly machine.

[Karlos]

256MB on the bppc here, which it the maximum it can take. I've had large projects manage to eat over 220MB, but it's rare.

[Framiga]

ask to FX and his A600 Server.

http://viten.dhs.org:8080/

2 megs of Fast Ram . . . incredible :-)

[Effy]

I also use the maximum of my Blizzard cards, 256 Mb on the BPPC´s and 128 Mb on my Bliz 1230/4 without scsi controller of course. The most memory hungry game I know is Napalm which seems to need 16 Mb to run on an 1230. On the other side it is very handy to have loads of Ram, since you can copy almost your whole Workbench into Ram so that when everything is copied the whole system runs much faster since  every file has to be loaded from Ram and not from harddisc. But yes, I know, copying everything into Ram takes a lot of time at startup but this can be solved by holding a mouse button at startup to avoid copying it all into the memory  :lol: But for normal usage, like playing normal AGA or OCS games I guess 16 Mb will be more than enough ...

Actually I would like to see a Ram board with 8 or 16 memory slots for a maximum of 128 Mb per slot ...  :-o

[Doobrey]

Framiga wrote:
ask to FX and his A600 Server.
2 megs of Fast Ram . . . incredible :-)

Nope..according to the index page, it's 2megs of chip ram. (I'm in a pedantic mood today :-D )

Anyway, back to the topic..
 My A4000 has 64Mb on the Cyberstorm, it very rarely goes below 40Mb free unless I'm unpacking stuff to RAM:
 My hacked about A1200 has 16Mb and the spare A1200 has 8Mb, and the poor neglected A500 only has 1Mb chip  :cry:
 TBH, the only times I've needed more memory is for some gcc stuff, I just fire up the PC and compile on WinUAE..not just for the extra memory, but it's a bit faster too.

[Legerdemain]

I'm runnings 256MB of RAM on my Blizzard 1260 / SCSI-Kit IV. I can't think of one single time I've used up everything, but there are times when I'm working with very large files on the RAM-disk for faster access. That's seldom, though.

[mr_a500]

I can tell you that 8Mb of Fast RAM is not enough. I've got 8Mb Fast in my A500 and I keep running out when browsing webpages with javascript and thousands of pictures. But by far the worst is trying to print with TurboPrint. That program is a memory pig and if you use it, make sure you have at least 32Mb!

I wish I could find a way just to add another 8Mb to my A500! (although for most things, 8Mb is still OK)

I don't see how anybody could run out with 128Mb - unless they're trying to do some crazy things. I'm sure on a Windows computer with 1Gb RAM, you could run out of memory if you really wanted to.

[X-ray]

"...I'm sure on a Windows computer with 1Gb RAM, you could run out of memory if you really wanted to..."
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I've run out with 2gb of RAM on my PC, so yes there is no guarantee of ever having enough.

[CLS2086]

256Mb on my BPPC 060/224 for PPC games and 3D Apps.