do i need more RAM?

I'd make sure you don't have any unnecessary programs running with the game first off. While 2 Gb should be okay, and if your system is otherwise good, a couple extra Gb of Ram wouldn't hurt - it's relatively cheap and will provide enough memory for the game while allowing the system and other items to be running.

The Television is working with people on finding any memory leaks. You'll probably want to check out that thread and see if it helps you, too.

Are you running dual monitors? In another thread, some people are reporting a memory leak with dual monitors and removing one of the monitors appears to assist the game in utilizing memory more efficiently.

Storm

Short answer: You do not NEED more than 2 GB of RAM, but you probably WANT more than 2 GB of ram. As games, including CoH, demand more, the number of programs that will run better if they've got 2 GB to themselves will only increase. If you've got older graphics drivers, dual monitors, or do base editing, there are known problems with workarounds you may want to read the other threads on; but in general if you can get your system to 3 GB things are likely to run much better.

More details: Any 32-bit program under relevant versions of Windows can use up to 2 GB of total RAM to improve its performance. Until recently, very few programs a home user would have would actually benefit from this much, but this has been an issue for engineering users and the like for quite a while. (Many programs run increasingly slow and then crash once they get close to the limit, so the practical limit is frequently more like 1.8 GB or so.)

The CoH requirements are woefully out of date. They don't allow for Rikti raids (zone or mothership), zombie invasions, anniversary events, or even being in Atlas while a costume contest is happening. They don't take into account that characters these days have access to many faster ways to switch back and forth through several zones. They don't mean you'll have high frame rates, fast load times, or the like. They are nearly worthless in terms of the sort of experience a player would like to have; they merely indicate that you've got an OK chance of starting the game in the first place.

As features are added to the game, memory size goes up. My minimal testing seems to show that seeing even a simple costume uses at least 3K, and can easily be rather more than that. While the game doesn't *have* to keep everything in RAM, anything it *can* keep around in RAM loads far faster than something it has to go off and search your hard disk for.

Regular use of the /unloadgfx command (after things have stabilized after zoning, to clean out data from the previous zone) can help somewhat, and there are some known bugs with base editing, older graphics drivers, and dual monitors with workarounds.

Ultimately, more and more programs are going to be able to use the full 2 GB for themselves, and there are (somewhat hackish) ways to allow certain programs to use 3 GB. I consider the recommended system for CoH to be one that has 2 GB of free memory for CoH after the operating system and anything else you usually run (web browser, music player, etc.); this usually means that you want at least 3 GB of total RAM, although there may well be substantial improvements in even going to 2.5 GB.

Also note that to actually take full advantage of multiple cores, you need to think in terms of memory-per-core. A quad-core system with only 4 GB of RAM may not actually perform that much better, because while it can run multiple programs, they will be starved of memory and fighting each other for the scraps.