How much does ram matter in gaming?

i recently got fifa 12 for pc and i tried it on my laptop first ,which has 4gb ram, duo core 2ghz and a gefore 9600m graphics card, i hooked it up to my tv and tried it on resolution of 1920x1080 but the game jerked alot. I then tried it on my desktop, which has 1gb ram, duo core 2.2ghz and a 9800gt graphics card but when i try the same game at same resolution it runs perfectly. Both pcs are running on windows 7. Iv been running the newst games on my desktop like dragon age 2, black ops with only 1gb ram on high with no problems so does ram really play a big role in gaming?|||GPU --%26gt; CPU --%26gt; RAM is the order of hardware importance when PC gaming





Fifa 12 is not a very demanding game but I'd suggest you tuning down the graphical settings if you wish to play on your laptop being that your video card is a little outdated and your Core2 Duo not meeting the minimal clock requirement. Try running the game at medium settings. Your desktop despite having less ram can handle the game better at a higher setting because of its superior CPU (mobile CPU will always be less powerful than an identical desktop counterpart) and largely because of its mid-high range video card, the 9800GT.|||1gb of ram certainly isn't optimal bit the video card is the most important thing for gaming and the 9600m is much, much weaker than the 9800GT which explains what you are experiencing.|||4GB of memory is fine, however your graphics chip is quite weak which is why you're suffering form low framerates. There's nothing that you can do about this except for buying a better laptop.|||the graphics card is whats killing it, the graphics processor in your desktop is far superior to the one in your laptop.|||Ram is only important for preventing game lag, when the system runs out of memory it starts to write into the paging file on the hard-drive. So with graphic intense games you will see a lot of slow down in frame rate when playing with low memory.