512 mb vs 1 gig of ram

[Jaged]

I have heard so many people say that any gaming machine should have at least 1 gig of ram. I have two gaming machines, one at my dad's and one at my mom's. Both of them only have 512. The one at my dad's is far newer and better then the one at my mom's. These are its specs: Radeon 9600 128mb, 512 RAM, Pentium4 2.8GHz. I can't remember the specs on the other one but the processor is aproxmatly 1.5 GHz and the video card is about a year old $200 Nvidia. My dad's comp runs anything from planetside to farcry as smooth as a baby's ass. My mom's comp lags like a bitch on planetside. I haven't tried many other recent games. Would adding extra ram to my mom's computer help with the lag? Also, if 1 gig of ram is so important like everyone says, then how does my dad's computer run so smoothly?

[Corrosion]

More RAM = good

Adding RAM to mom's could severly help gameplay.

[dscytherulez]

Indeed.

[Electrofreak]

I went from 256 meg PC2100 to 1 gig PC3500. The difference in performance is INDESCRIBABLE. I mean its frigging amazing. Wheras before, I would stutter and freeze for several seconds whenever somebody fired a gun or I got anywhere near any action, now I get 40+ FPS in huge battles. So yeah... RAM is definately important lol

edit: It has also been found that PSide is very CPU intensive as well... however you have to have the RAM to supplement a good CPU, I was the poster child for that situation as all of the Black Hawks well know

[OneManArmy]

heck yea, I recently went from a gig of ram down to 768mb (stick died) and damn even with a small decrease like that i notice longer load times in BF:v and other games. ram is good. chicks love ram.

[Rbstr]

I recently made the transition my frames didn;t relay go up but the minumum frames did go up alot. Also the door loading freeze dissapeared