Will virtual memory increase gaming performance?

[SepelaThons]

Title

[Astro_80 (WASH YOUR HANDS!)]

Not enough to give you a pleasant experience. Add more RAM.

[Bonus Ducks!]

YouTube™ Video: How Much Ram Do You Need for Video Editing? 

Views: 147,274

How Much Ram Do You Need for Video Editing? When Video Editing Ram, CPU and GPU are essential to speeding up video editing and video rendering. But how much ram do you need?

I think this is somewhat relevant.

[tacoshy]

Well there 2 intresting Memory usage:

VRAM on your GPU that is needed to store textures
DRAM which is the normal RAM used for you CPU

VRAM is slightly faster tthen DRAM but dedicated for the GPU alone. If you run out of VRAM your normal RAM and your drive has to make up for it.

DDR4-2400 RAM has a speed faster then 60,000MB/s in read and write. If you sue it as RAMDisc you even have random read speeds of around 15,000-16,000MB/s

The fastes SSD has a seq. read speed of 3,500MB/s and ~2,500MB/s random read speed. if you compare now the fastes read speed on a SSD of ~2,500MB/s to the ~60,000MB/s of the RAM you see that you cant even slightly make up for it.
Also Accesstimes are important. While good RAM has an acesstime of around 13-16 nanoseconds the accesstimes of a fast SSD is still aroun 1-2miliseconds. Also somethign where you see that a drive cant hold up with the RAM

=> Therefor a drive cant replace the performance of RAM.

[xSOSxHawkens]

If you have 4GB or less RAM and also have a decent SSD, then yes, increasing your page file to 8-16GB will offer a naticable improvment in loading, alt-tabbing, and general multi-tasking, gaming or not.

If you have a mechanical HDD and are low on RAM (4GB or less) and you want better performance on the cheap from your pagefile install a secondary HDD and split the page file 8GB per drive, and install games onto the non-C drive.

This will ensure that as the game data is loaded into the system RAM from disk 2, the system can dump its non-game data from memory and into the page file, allowing the maximum RAM for the game in question to use.

With low ram and a single HDD, the system has to pull a bit of data off the disk, load it into ram, pull a bit of old data from ram, write it to the pagefile, then repeat untill all the data that needs pulled is where it belongs. Having a second disk or SSD will allow this to happen at a rate that will signifigantly increase daily performance in muti-tasking and loading scenarios.

Once loaded, it will do NOTHING for the frame rate (fps) of the game (though in some games might help with pop in).



To give an idea of performacne difference. On my secondary rig (Athlon II x4 @ 3.7Ghz, HD7870 at time of testing) with a single mechanical HDD and 6GB RAM, BF4 maps take upwards of 90 seconds to load, someitmes as much as 120+...

Same system with twin HDD and spluit pagefile drops loading down to consistently under 60 seconds.

Same system with cheap SSD and 16GB page file will load in an average of 30-40 seconds.




As for pagefile usage, contrary to popular belief it is still used heavily, even in systems with proper levels of RAM...My lap[top I am using tonight (8GB RAM, 2x8GB page files on twin HDD) has seen a max of 4.3GB page file usage so far tonight, and is sitting at over 3GB usage just at desktop. All I have played tonight is TES-III Morrowind, which is ancient, so that give you an idea of basic usage. On my main rig with 16GB ram and 16GB Page on SSD, I regulalry see upwards of 5-6GB pagefile usage while gaming, as the OS dumps all non-essential data to the pagefile to free RAM for games. The more RAM your program wants, the more agefile the system will use. If you dont have enough space for the RAM on the pagefile you will either be unable to use it all with your app, or you will have the system dump data completly and be stuck waiting on a hard fault search of the disk before you can continue.;

[tacoshy]

hmmm well I'm on a 7700K and BF4 runs on a SSD with 32GB RAM. Load times for a map is below 2 seconds for me...

IMO trying to tweak to make up for not having enough RAM will give you a little performance bosot but not make up for it. If you still run on 4GB RAM where we all can agree that it is not enough you should upgrade RAM.

Besides the task for RAM is not to only speed up loading times... Missing RAM has more sever problems like stuttering, fps drops, freezes. PUBG players with to less VRAM and normal RAM can tell you long stories about it and pagefile nor installing the game on fast SSD's make entirely up for it.

[Arya]

Short answer is no. In a gaming context it won't compensate for not having enough RAM.

[xSOSxHawkens]

There was a short time in ~2011 where I was running Skyrim on 2GB ram...

I used a USB 3.0 jump drive that was rated over 150MB/s R/W as a wanna-be SSD, and tricked windows into putting a pagefile on there too...

Was enough to get me playable frame rates where I had un playable stuttering before...


Though you will never hear me advise against more RAM, if one is simply limited on their options there are ways to make due...

[Bad 💀 Motha]

You don't even need a PageFile, period... install more RAM
PageFile of around 1GB is all you will ever need.

[-=SOF=-WID99]

Originally posted by SepelaThons :D:

Title

only in a few older games .. like win xp ones .. these days ,, nope .. buy and add more ram

Bad Motha is right

xSOSxHawkens is also right as i did use a 4 gig junp drive under winXP - 7 *early version of 7 * it helped a bit when i only had 2 gig of ddr ram on a really old with a P4 prescott 3.4 ghz single core CPU ..if you still have a CPU that old .. its past time to upgrade

so Bad Motha wins this round .. ADD RAM

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well others had already said that I think; but yea you don't really need anything set for PageFile; in fact wipe out whatever WinOS sets for that and set it yourself. And always to C drive, never to any other drive, period. Oh you have an SSD as your OS Drive, yea so what... it's not going to hurt the drive one bit.

You have to basically go back to non-NT Windows OS is really when PageFile was needed.
Apps that still uses this after Win98/ME were just lazy devs to be honest, cause it wasn't need to make an app use PageFile, nor is it really a good thing that you write an app that forces the use of the PageFile. PageFile was more helpful overall on 32-bit OS due to the lack of allowed max physical RAM; now that isn't a problem, use 64-bit OS and just install whatever RAM you need..

[Big Boom Boom]

Originally posted by tacoshy:

Well there 2 intresting Memory usage:

VRAM on your GPU that is needed to store textures
DRAM which is the normal RAM used for you CPU

VRAM is slightly faster tthen DRAM but dedicated for the GPU alone. If you run out of VRAM your normal RAM and your drive has to make up for it.

DDR4-2400 RAM has a speed faster then 60,000MB/s in read and write. If you sue it as RAMDisc you even have random read speeds of around 15,000-16,000MB/s

The fastes SSD has a seq. read speed of 3,500MB/s and ~2,500MB/s random read speed. if you compare now the fastes read speed on a SSD of ~2,500MB/s to the ~60,000MB/s of the RAM you see that you cant even slightly make up for it.
Also Accesstimes are important. While good RAM has an acesstime of around 13-16 nanoseconds the accesstimes of a fast SSD is still aroun 1-2miliseconds. Also somethign where you see that a drive cant hold up with the RAM

=> Therefor a drive cant replace the performance of RAM.

Optane and Samsung Z-NAND SLC SSD says hi.

Also VRAM is significantly faster than DRAM. GDDR5X, GDDR6 and then HBM2 walk all over fastest DDR4.

[-=SOF=-WID99]

come to think of it i think that early version of win 7 was 32 bit that i used when a page file seemed to help .. it was not all all a huge boost ..and may have only been since the hard drives in that old Sony system were still IDE ..not SATA ..so adding a jump drive and adding the page file on that USB 2..0? drive was a bit faster to load things

but i do remember it helped in an old game i used to play .. think it was vietcong ? for Soldier of fortune 2 or 3 ?

[Big Boom Boom]

Well 32bit OS limited to 4Gb RAM no?

[-=SOF=-WID99]

yep and that old system i ran only supported 2 gig max for mermory chips

4 512 meg ddr 1 dim chips = 2 gig ..thats the only time i saw a page file be any help
or that silly windows Jump drive system work

this is the silly thing i am talking about ..it was called ready boost

https://www.winhelp.us/use-readyboost-in-windows-vista-and-7.html

its of no use now

the answer .. now = buy and add more ram

[ViciousBlades]

I actually have a question relating to this.
I want to play CSGO right, but I don't have enough VRAM and don't meet the minimum CPU. If I increase my VRAM so it is more than just enough, can I still play CS or will it still be unplayable?