Difference between 1gb ram and 512mb ram android?

[BluSamurai]

I have been thinking whether to buy the ZTE Avid 4G, LG Motion 4G, and LG MS870. the LG MS870 is rumored to come out in the first few months of 2013, but the ZTE Avid and LG Motion already came out and both have the same processors but the ZTE has 512mb ram and LG Motion has 1GB ram and I have saw some gameplay footage of it playing Modern Combat 3 with good fps. I only saw one game with the ZTE avid and it was Temple Run pretty impressive but is the 512Mb ram going to affect HD quallity games like GTA 3, Vice City, Need For Speed Most Wanted, The Dark Knight rises and many more?

 

[Metroid Prime]

Moved to Device/Carrier comparisons section.

 

[SIII groupie]

I would go 1GB. I don't do much gaming but with the following phones Samsung G1 (512), G2 (1GB) and G3 (2GB). Less slugish with each beyond what I guess is CPU alone. My G3 can be set to clock almost as low as G2.


CPU, RAM and drive are the three critical components for performance. Depending on task anyone could be the bottleneck. Starting with better/more prevents/delays the onset.

 

[chanchan05]

Its not really gonna have an effect on the game itself. It will have an effect depending on how many apps you have set to run in the background, or how many widgets or how many customizations you did. My phone for example has only 512MB RAM. It lags like hell playing Subway Surfers if I have a third party launcher running. But if I revert to stock launcher, it runs ok.

 

[jj2me]

I have an unrooted LG Revolution with 512MB of RAM (really about 330MB or so available), and it bogs down with
- about 200 installed apps, whether or not they are running (it makes a difference, I guess the pointer information to apps is stored in RAM at startup).
- lots of widgets and apps and services running,
- a couple of RAM hogs running, like the standard e-mail client (it consumes about 50MB of RAM).

After a year of dealing with lag and observing that lag is inversely proportional to available RAM, I am on a stricted diet of widgets (only one as of today), running apps and services, and total installed apps. And I watch Running Services constantly (I keep having to kill the Amazon appstore app, for example, after I use that app).

So 512MB of RAM on an unrooted phone (bloatware consumes precious RAM, I don't know how it'd be if I rooted) requires my attention in order to run acceptably.

512 MB of RAM is ok if:
- you're on a budget
- you monitor running apps and services and respond appropriately to low RAM.
- you kill running processes before you play RAM-intensive games,
- you don't install many apps, like keep it below 100 or 125.

For me and my app usage, I'll never buy another 512 MB RAM phone. I'll probably go for 2GB on my next phone. I sometimes read posts mentioning occasional lag on high end 1GB phones, but have seen none saying that about 2GB phones.


P.S. Listen to chanchan05, who set me straight about total number of apps, and thus helped me get a more usable phone.