Questions about RAM and Assets

[THartmann9374]

Hello all,
I have 16 GB of RAM. I might get 32 GB of RAM, but depends on budget. Cities Skylines's recommended RAM is 6 GB. I have all of DLCs.

Do I need to get 32 GB of RAM or is pagefile on SSD good enough? What's the size of pagefile on SSD should I set?

And what are "assets" that I have been seeing all across posts? Are assets from DLCs or only from workshop? Like I said I have all of DLCs and only plan to get a few items from workshop, is that enough?

Thanks!

[Lee the Yote]

I get 17-30 fps with 8gb ram and 1600 assets, I think you should be fine, I set the page file to about 16gb but you could go higher.
I have industries and mass transit

[MarkJohnson]

It really depends on your whole rig. Maybe post all specs of your PC.

Generally speaking, you should be fine with 16 GB of RAM. This is usually enough to keep all of your map's assets loading into memory what are being used in the city.

Most cities I look at usually only have a few hundred Assets plopped in the city. If they aren't in your city, then they will be fine in your page file.

A 1,000 asset subscription will generally consume around 16 GB of memory.

[Verullus Forgefire]

Originally posted by THartmann9374:

And what are "assets" that I have been seeing all across posts? Are assets from DLCs or only from workshop? Like I said I have all of DLCs and only plan to get a few items from workshop, is that enough?

Assets are buildings, park's, vehicles and other stuff which you can download on the workshop.
A lot of people are having this workshop syndrome, since the workshop is very addictive many beautiful buildings there.
Friendly advice would be always read the description of the asset in case something special needs to be downloaded or whatever.

[LemonsterOG]

I'm using 123 mods and over 4,000 assets. My city is only at 40,000 population, but I'm getting 15 fps on zoomed view (very close) and 20 fps at "normal" zoom.

Here's my MacBook Pro stats: Click Here

Edit: Changed fps

[TLHeart]

I run on an old AMD phenomII 6 core processor, with 16 G ram... page file set to max 48G. Also have a GTX 1050i graphics card. I get 12 to 15 fps on my city of 100,000, with 11 tiles unlocked. I use about 20 mods, TMPE a CPU hog, :), and about 150 assets, many of them vehicles.

[LemonsterOG]

You're definitely more technically advanced than I am. I shared my stats with you in hopes of giving you an idea of what I'm able to do this my system. I honestly don't know enough about how it all works. I do use 81 Tiles and TM:PE, so I'm using all tiles along with a lot of complicated use of TM:PE. I use TM:PE heavily and with very complicated timed traffic lights (32 lights in 5 intersections at one spot).

I hear ya on the vehicles. I have over 500 custom vehicles in use. I disable 98% of all default vehicles in the game using AVO along with IPT2 and SVS2 to customize my public transport and services. I use Emergency Lights Manager to change the emergency vehicle lights to my country's look. It all helps the game look more realistic, at least to me.

You may find some information in the Guides section. There's a lot of information there, including system requirements.

I hope you find what works for you.

[AoD_lexandro]

Excessively large page files can reduce performance on non SSD drives, as the system has to search through the entire PF on disc at a time.

With Windows 10, if you read your "commit charge" on task manager memory panel, that notes how big a PF you actually need.

[THartmann9374]

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

It really depends on your whole rig. Maybe post all specs of your PC.

Generally speaking, you should be fine with 16 GB of RAM. This is usually enough to keep all of your map's assets loading into memory what are being used in the city.

Most cities I look at usually only have a few hundred Assets plopped in the city. If they aren't in your city, then they will be fine in your page file.

A 1,000 asset subscription will generally consume around 16 GB of memory.

My specs are: I7 6700K 4.0 GHZ, 16 GB of RAM, NVIDIA 1070 8 GB, 1 TB SSD and other HDDs (7200 RPM).

[MarkJohnson]

Sounds like workshop issue. Try to temporarily launch the game with the launch option -disableMods flag. It will still have all assets available.

Post your results full zoomed-in on a busy intersection.

You may need to start a new city. If so, test with and without launch flag for comparison.

[Lee the Yote]

Originally posted by THartmann9374:

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

It really depends on your whole rig. Maybe post all specs of your PC.

Generally speaking, you should be fine with 16 GB of RAM. This is usually enough to keep all of your map's assets loading into memory what are being used in the city.

Most cities I look at usually only have a few hundred Assets plopped in the city. If they aren't in your city, then they will be fine in your page file.

A 1,000 asset subscription will generally consume around 16 GB of memory.

My specs are: I7 6700K 4.0 GHZ, 16 GB of RAM, NVIDIA 1070 8 GB, 1 TB SSD and other HDDs (7200 RPM).

That's way better than what I have, you should be fine with the ram you have untill you want to upgrade.

[Ellysmere Haven]

You should avoid using a big pagefile when you're playing on a ssd. It will decrease it's overall life span considerably.

[RabbitRidge]

Ancient advice constantly espoused for some reason. Quality SSDs outlast mechanical HDDs under virtually any circumstance these days, not to mention the far superior access time.

As for Page File, Win10 does a great job of managing it automatically by itself.

[Metacritical]

Originally posted by Ellysmere Haven:

You should avoid using a big pagefile when you're playing on a ssd. It will decrease it's overall life span considerably.

that was true when SSDs were first introduced, but SSDs are far more reliable now. I have had my pagefile on every SSD that i ever owned and they all still work perfectly, can't say the same for some of my mechanical drives that are younger than my SSDs which did not have a pagefile on them.

[CA$H THE GREAT]

I run a Samsung 960 Pro SSD and have completely eliminated the page file, no issues - The only thing faster than SSD is RAM itself or chip cache on the processor. Highly recommend Samsung M.2 form factor drives or Intel Optane series

[CA$H THE GREAT]

Originally posted by RabbitRidge:

Ancient advice constantly espoused for some reason. Quality SSDs outlast mechanical HDDs under virtually any circumstance these days, not to mention the far superior access time.

As for Page File, Win10 does a great job of managing it automatically by itself.

Though I've only had my Samsung 960 Pro for for 2 1/2 years, I would tend to agree with this. No issues to report, only that the drive will start to slow down if you go past upper 80s % capacity but that is common drive knowledge anyway. Crystal Disk benchmark shows it in the neighborhood of 3000 MB/sec reads and 2200 MB/sec WRITES - An incredible 26x faster than my old hard drive.....

Mean Time Between Failure was at 1.5 million hours if I remember rightly.

If you do still want a great hard drive as backup, the Western Digital Gold (enterprise grade) drives are priced very similar to their high-performance Black series and are far better in terms of longevity and performance.