I'm displaying a pretty good mix of features: polygons, lines, points, and annotation. Some features are labelled. I zoom to a scale where pretty much everything is displayed, say 1:2400, and start panning around with the task manager active, say 4-8 miles. If the file GDB is uncompressed, the memory consumption level stays pretty constant; but if the file GDB is compressed, I can watch the level climbing as previously unrendered features are rendered.