64gb vs. 128gb

[ej-mcd]

I am going to be building a new PC for workstation/editing/gaming. Will the 128gb of Ram with a 10 core CPU be able to handle an extremely large city and an obscene amount of custom assets (talking 4,000+ custom assets plus base assets)? One of these days I may go through and delete the majority of the stock assets from loading.

[MainMan02]

Just completed a city with 500k+ population using all tiles, with 32gb of memory and 1300+/- assets, all DLCs, and 50+mods. It is posted in my profile . You should have no problem. Thinking about adding another 32gb of ram.

[CyberVibes]

Imo 64GB is more than enough for heavy detailing in a large city, you'll run into game limits before you run out of resources, go for the fastest single core speed you can and ram that's at minimum 2666mhz add a 500GB-1TB Nvme drive as well

I've swapped out most of the base games buildings and vehicles using Loading Screen mod skip prefab feature, i have all the DLC's and am using around 2500 workshop assets with another 3500 sat in my 64GB pagefile, ram usage is around 15GB and 48GB pagefile on a city with 40k population. I make sure all other apps are closed when gaming and i've trimmed my windows install down to about 1.4GB, i can still browse and watch video if i want to but adds about 1GB of ram use. so even with 32GB i'm conscious of what i can add 64GB i wouldn't be concerned as much.

But with all that said you have to manage your content wisely you can have 4000 assets with that setup and add one mod that conflicts with another and your ram use can sky rocket and game goes to a crawl.

[MarkJohnson]

Well, all DLC will use over 20GB of memory. And 1,000 assets are roughly 16GB of RAM. So, 4,000 assets are arounf 64GB plus 20GB of base game.

But, unless you plan on plopping every single building in tghe game, then you likely will never have over 1,000 assets in your city. The other 3,000+ assets will just be offloaded to your swap file or just be sitting in RAM waiting to be paged out when needed.

But, the extra RAM could be handy for workstation duties. Otherwise, overkill for this game. I have 32GB of RAM and I've loaded 7,000 asset cities I've worked on for others without issue. I do have a 96GB page file and was up to 120GB total memory in use.

The game only uses up to 8-threads and designed for a quad core with hyper-threading (4-cores/8-threads) so anything over that will be overkill, but useful for other apps running.

With all that said, you'll still not maintain over 30fps no matter your specs. If you maintain that now, then you are already golden for this game.

[ShadowHunter]

My Current specs.

SSD Hard Drive:
1TB Samsung 860 Evo SATA 6Gb/s 3D-NAND TLC

Processor:
Intel Core i9 9900KF 8x 3.60GHz in Gaming mode 5GHz.

Memory:
DDR4 128RAM (4X 32GB RipJaws 3200)

Motherboard:
MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge

Graphics Card:
8GB Gigabyte GeForce RTX2070 SUPER Gaming

Operating System:
64bit Windows 10 Pro.

I upgraded actually today, the last day of 2020 to 128GB RAM. Why do you ask because I have 128 MODS and over 8800 assets.

I know, I have a problem :D. Regardless, I tested it to see how quickly the game loads and how smooth it runs. It is a thing of beauty. In my opinion, if you can afford it, you can never go wrong with more RAM, providing the motherboard supports it. Do not limit yourself with the ram. I started off on this rig with 32 GB RAM, which I built last year.

There are a few tweaks that had to be done to bring this 128 to its glory, which are easy enough to do.

[snowflitzer]

Regardless of your RAM, you need a pagefile, because of how Windows works.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2114415052

[ChronischeStaar]

Weird flex but oke.

[Justa Guy]

It depends a bit on if you run mods and how many. Vanilla wise most PC's should run this game find as traffic Despawning and other such things keep the game pretty smooth. However if you bump up the graphics, turn off despawning, increase the city tile size to 84 etc you need more and more power to run it smoothly.

There is also something seriously wrong with the code and at the high end nothing seems to really help. This game is 5 years old now with some fairly low end graphics all things considered. Yet it eats up memory and power like crazy, not optimized very well at all.

[ShadowHunter]

@snowflitzer

That is the first thing I did when I upgraded the PC, tweaked the pagefile.

[C_Fear]

I tweaked the pagefile when I discovered that buying DLC makes you use more memory and 16GB wasn't enough anymore.
Set it to 32GB, and now with just one mod (the mod that adds so many new roads) extra it's telling me it's out of memory again.
At this rate I'd better not buy any more DLC or install any more mods because I might as well buy a 1TB SSD and assign the whole drive to pagefile.

EDIT: now it won't even start a new vanilla map without crashing my graphics drivers or running out of memory lol, it's getting silly. Maybe Network Extensions 2 has something to do with it, maybe not. Curiously the crashlog mentions a 16GB pagefile limit, which is impossible because I just verified that it's 32GB.

[ThisHero]

i have a question. in a scenario where you have a lot more ram than is necessary for a game like this, would there be a benefit to limiting or even disabling pagefile in order to force everything to be loaded into (significantly) faster ram?

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by C_Fear:

I tweaked the pagefile when I discovered that buying DLC makes you use more memory and 16GB wasn't enough anymore.
Set it to 32GB, and now with just one mod (the mod that adds so many new roads) extra it's telling me it's out of memory again.
At this rate I'd better not buy any more DLC or install any more mods because I might as well buy a 1TB SSD and assign the whole drive to pagefile.

DLC isn't using much RAM, DLC gets sent to Virtual Memory, which is on windows' pagefile. If your RAM is full, then you have other apps or malware running on your system. Workshop can stay in RAM, usually mods that need to run with the game to monitor what is going on in your city like traffic mods or graphics quality mods.

EDIT: now it won't even start a new vanilla map without crashing my graphics drivers or running out of memory lol, it's getting silly. Maybe Network Extensions 2 has something to do with it, maybe not. Curiously the crashlog mentions a 16GB pagefile limit, which is impossible because I just verified that it's 32GB.

If your graphics are crashing you system, then you may have hardware issues, or overheating from dust/debris in your system.

Maybe post your crash log and all relevant info that leads to the crash. It might be better to post to the devs at the cities skyline forums at paradox.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/support-bug-reports.879/

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by ThisHero:

i have a question. in a scenario where you have a lot more ram than is necessary for a game like this, would there be a benefit to limiting or even disabling pagefile in order to force everything to be loaded into (significantly) faster ram?

The paging file for windows is flakey for this game from the way the Steam Workshop handles the workshop.

I would always have a page file, usually it is manually set to the size of your RAM or bigger.

[C_Fear]

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

Originally posted by C_Fear:

I tweaked the pagefile when I discovered that buying DLC makes you use more memory and 16GB wasn't enough anymore.
Set it to 32GB, and now with just one mod (the mod that adds so many new roads) extra it's telling me it's out of memory again.
At this rate I'd better not buy any more DLC or install any more mods because I might as well buy a 1TB SSD and assign the whole drive to pagefile.

DLC isn't using much RAM, DLC gets sent to Virtual Memory, which is on windows' pagefile. If your RAM is full, then you have other apps or malware running on your system. Workshop can stay in RAM, usually mods that need to run with the game to monitor what is going on in your city like traffic mods or graphics quality mods.

EDIT: now it won't even start a new vanilla map without crashing my graphics drivers or running out of memory lol, it's getting silly. Maybe Network Extensions 2 has something to do with it, maybe not. Curiously the crashlog mentions a 16GB pagefile limit, which is impossible because I just verified that it's 32GB.

If your graphics are crashing you system, then you may have hardware issues, or overheating from dust/debris in your system.

Maybe post your crash log and all relevant info that leads to the crash. It might be better to post to the devs at the cities skyline forums at paradox.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/support-bug-reports.879/

I figured out what the problem was.
Back when I built my rig, I set the pagefile to my HDD because at the time there was a bit of uncertainty as to whether having your pagefile on your SSD would deteriorate it faster.
Up to buying some DLC for Cities Skylines, that was never a problem for me, but I won't necessarily blame the coding of the game for it.
It could be that the game doesn't recognise that the main pagefile (which I set to 32GB) is on the HDD instead of the SSD and runs out of memory. It's what the crashlog indicated as well, the game thought I only have 16GB in total addressable.
Just as equally, it could be because Windows 10 doesn't communicate it properly.

The solution was to reconfigure the pagefile so I don't have one on my HDD, and the new one on my OS drive (the SSD) is set to 32GB.
Runs flawless now.

[MarkJohnson]

Glad you got it figured out.

[Phantom-Strider]

Originally posted by ChronischeStaar:

Weird flex but oke.

Envious response if I have ever smelt one.