Can zdoom run just about any wad with 512mb system ram?

[invictius]

My "go off the grid" netbook with basically every wad ever made only has 512mb ram.  I'm guessing that wads over about 300mb (run on xp that would use 128mb at a guess) wouldn't be able to load?

[Graf Zahl]

It's not that easy.  Actual memory usage depends on how many resources a map requires.

Unless you start using large quantities of high resolution textures you should be fine with the software renderer. GZDoom in OpenGL will require more resources, though and some maps with many textures can cause problems.

[Traysandor]

Graf Zhal's answer works in most cases.

 

Just do yourself a favor and skip out on any .wad file (Or single level) that has massive qualntities of monsters active at once (Most giant slaughtermaps, or anything that resembles NUTS.wad) and you should do just fine in most cases. Most of the older clssic megawads won't come anywhere near close to lag-reducing amounts of monsters (Well, maybe not HR2 Map32, but yeah).

 

Yes, NUTS.wad will slow even rigs built for 4K gaming to a crawl, but that's mostly due to the engine itself trying to do way too much at once that causes the massive lag and less so on the computer's actual resources - the engines the game is built on and the source ports that utilize them literally cannot handle so much stuff all going on at the same time.

Edited May 25, 2017 by Traysandor