As more and more "midrange" systems are offered with more than 512mb RAM, the axiom of "XMB of RAM is more than enough" is soon to change(again). The benefits of having 2GB of RAM in a box versus 1GB have been debated many times, with the gaming "Standard" right now being 1GB. Corsair has published a detailed document that describes and demonstrates performance impact moving from 1GB to 2GB of RAM. It is in PDF format and can be downloaded from Corsair's Tech Notes page. Some of the benchmarks are very interesting. Though memory bandwidth is hardly affected by increase size (to be expected), there are some very significant gains in games in other areas. An Intel machine running Battlefield 2 scores a whopping 35% improvement for the additional RAM, quite a bit when you consider that it is usually the video card looked at before anything else. The note is summed up with this:
"The performance increase realized in real-world applications like Battlefield 2 and Premier elements indicate that the current generation of enthusiast systems will certainly benefit from the selection of 2 Gbyte memory arrays."