Went from 16 to 32 RAM and WOW what a difference

[clarkeveritas]

Title. I kept hearing that 16 was enough and that this game was CPU-bound- but I just installed more ram today and DEAR GOD- the whole game was running very slowly, likely because I had so many ships and I just started running the Osseran Raider Whatnot.... but I've been running dogfights in a tiny Boron ship in the midst of massive capital-ship-massive-destruction, and it's just been great.

I don't have an amazing CPU or GPU, prob average, but this one change has been amazing. Wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences. Because honestly this was not what I was told to expect.

[Captain Canard]

I run 32 GB RAM with virtual memory (swap) turned off, and I've never had the problems others have with their framerates tanking. I have no idea if it's the RAM or something else (I run a very stripped down and optimized version of Windows 10), but maybe!

BTW, I don't get any crashes or "out of memory" issues with swap turned off, and I do think it helps with performance, since otherwise your computer will swap even when it doesn't need to.

[clarkeveritas]

No idea what swap means, but the moment i put in 2 16GB sicks instead of my old 2 8GB sticks all my framerate issues faded away. Just felt the urge to mention that because 1) it's a VERY cheap upgrade, and 2) I've seen dozens if not hundreds of posts saying that it wouldn't make a difference. I personally got it for a different reason but the moment i logged back into my save which had been disgustingly slow for a while, now I'm flying a fighter in a massive cap-ship battle and its running like when my save was brand new. Perhaps I'm the exception- but I'll take it.

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by clarkeveritas:

...I've seen dozens if not hundreds of posts saying that it wouldn't make a difference...

Yeah I've learned not to listen to all those "experts" when it comes to the performance of this game. Works great for me too, so I guess that makes us both exceptions.

[mmmcheesywaffles]

A lot depends upon what specific hardware you are running AND what OS.

One of the things that can speed up immensely is caching. The extra RAM can allow more caches to be stored in RAM than on the slower SSD etc.

Even though your OS may not handle more than 16 Gig efficiently, installing 32 Gig can maximise the I/O transfer speeds. However that doesn't work for everyone or on every game. CPU bottlenecking as opposed to GPU bottlenecking will still occur and in some cases get get worse with more RAM.

Since most gamers are playing with W10 or W11 their OS can handle a lot more RAM than most previous OS

Lots of RAM can give more breathing room to some hardware drivers that will use available RAM. Well written firmware will cache to the fastest media it finds.

Your GPU and motherboard may well cache any extra RAM it needs into caches on system RAM.

When I upgraded my motherboard to a ROG Maximus V and added another 16 Gig to give 32Gig installed I did see a small performance improvement in several instances. Despite the fact that my OS was limited to 16 Gig [W7Home]

My guess is that the OS limitations only caused problems with software and that the ROG Firmware was boosting the Firmware caching a little. There was a noticeable increase in Boot up speed and probably in PCI I/O

Most recommendations of not needing more than 16 Gig may well be down to misunderstandings of which OS's actually support more RAM.

[PeaceMaker]

You can never go wrong from a 16 gig change to 32 - Pretty much in everything, you'll notice the difference. It'll make it look like your game has jumped up in frames big time. I don't really care to explain the jargon, i just know it makes things better.

Interestingly 32 to 64 doesn't make much more of a difference in games in my experience.

[Tommytools]

I always notice that when folks talk about RAM they tend to omit mentioning multi-channel. Most motherboards are dual channel these days (the rest triple or more), yet I've seen so many gaming PCs at work that have all their RAM modules in a single channel, including many big brands that should know better.

It has been at least 5 years since I built a gaming PC with 16 GB, at work we always recommend 32. At the same time, going with 16 GB does give you a functional system (enough to run X4), but running and decent performance are not the same thing.

[BluB3rry]

Originally posted by clarkeveritas:

No idea what swap means, but the moment i put in 2 16GB sicks instead of my old 2 8GB sticks all my framerate issues faded away. Just felt the urge to mention that because 1) it's a VERY cheap upgrade, and 2) I've seen dozens if not hundreds of posts saying that it wouldn't make a difference. I personally got it for a different reason but the moment i logged back into my save which had been disgustingly slow for a while, now I'm flying a fighter in a massive cap-ship battle and its running like when my save was brand new. Perhaps I'm the exception- but I'll take it.

Did you enable exmp profile?
Try to find ram overclock timings for your own ram\mobo combo on internet.
3.8 or better 4k for ddr4 and 6.4 or 7k for ddr5 is are must nowadays.

[BluB3rry]

Originally posted by PeaceMaker:

You can never go wrong from a 16 gig change to 32 - Pretty much in everything, you'll notice the difference. It'll make it look like your game has jumped up in frames big time. I don't really care to explain the jargon, i just know it makes things better.

Interestingly 32 to 64 doesn't make much more of a difference in games in my experience.

Most of the games right now wont even cache over 24\8 gb on 4k.

[Kensingt0n]

can u list ur pc specs OP, and your framerates?

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by PeaceMaker:

Interestingly 32 to 64 doesn't make much more of a difference in games in my experience.

When I would play certain games using 16 GB with virtual memory (swap) turned off, I would eventually get "OUT OF MEMORY" errors on certain games. I've never had that problem with 32 GB, even when I open a browsers in the background while the game is running.

But it makes sense as I think about it. Imagine a game designed to be able to run on 16 GB actually requiring over 32 GB of memory - that would result in constant page file access which would kill performance (and your SSD). A well optimized game would avoid flooding memory to minimize this.

[SinisterSlay]

My late game with all DLC and mods seems to usually need 12 gigs of RAM. So 16 total wasn't enough because Windows 10 is a pig, and windows 11 is even worse. I regularly had to make sure everything was closed, razer software, steam minimum mode, amd software, everything I could close I did to get down to 3gig used, that allowed the game to run full speed.

[Mike]

Unless you have insanely large complex game my bet is that the file-cache is more of an boon than the game getting access to more memory to work from as its not that memory consuming all things considered. That said if you run tons of bloat on the system with 16gb while playing the game it can really start to tank the performance if it gets to little with huge end game saves

[clarkeveritas]

Um, specs are i7 12700 kf, 3060ti ( Ialways buy 60 or 60tis when they get a few years old, great value). Everything running stock, none of that overclocking wackiness. Don't have before/after fps because I've using a backup monitor right now and since i can't get over 60 right now i turned off the counter, but I'll say that it went from noticeably sluggish all the time and slide-show during large engagements to stutter-free, even when tested in Matrix 451- where one of my mega-bases has been under near constant attack for a while (and had easily the most massive battle ever there when I accidently turned the Osseran Raider Settings too high..... fixed my mistake but the spawned enemies were still in existence until destroyed.... those MK1 and Mk3s are absolutely, positively not messing around in any way).

I had noticed that random background stuff, mostly windows garbage with names I'm clueless about were taking up abnormally large chunks of memory since I got this new PC. My goal was really just to reduce their impact on everything but it turned out nicely. And the clockspeed on the RAM is basically the same, 34-something to 3600, and still DDR4. I just grabbed the cheapest 32gb kit i could find at a good deal from a brand I had actually heard of....

I had been turning off X4 map features to help out a bit, but now I can leave on "Show Allied Fleet Moves" and all that stuff. Being friends with everyone and having every ship's actions shown on the map did seem to take a chunk out of performance.

[clarkeveritas]

Just registered that Win 11 comment- it really had been worse in just about every way from Win10. It even has this annoying thing where "Cut, Copy, Paste etc" don't pop up when I right click, it's under the "Other Options" section which brings up all the basic functions I needed in the first place. Anyone have a fix for that one? It's like they want to ruin all my hard-earned muscle memory while making so many things counter-intuitive.

Oh- and I went straight for memory because GPU and CPU load never really seem to be issues with my games, but memory usage has always been suspiciously high on this new rig. I suspect the communists.

[Mike]

Win11 can be tweaked to be more like win10 just like that desktop context menu ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and yeah.. shouldn't be needed to begin with! Microsoft is doing a great job at boosting the number of peeps opting for linux looking at every window major release as of late. Or that start button that keeps changing place... and that... and that :)

I bet the new AI features coming to windows will be more utilized to datamine and profile you than actually help YOU... who pay for the computer and its electricity!