Does Memory Matter? 4GB versus 8GB versus 16GB in Gaming

[UaVaj]

Its basic computer knowledge you learn, memory > hard drive.

The reality is it works, it works well.

when one cannot comprehend something as simple as 12800 MB/s is greater than 540 MB/s.

wasting bandwidth explaining.

 

[taq8ojh]

Please educate us on the subject of the godly benefits of loading few hundreds of megabytes at your 12800MB/s rather than the usual ~500MB/s of good SSDs.

 

[Deders]

Extra bandwidth is only useful if the application actually makes use of it. I've yet to see anything that makes my SSD use more than 100MB/s in non benchmark apps.

 

[taq8ojh]

Try to explain that to the genius above...

 

[taltamir]

What hassle of setting it up? It takes like 30seconds now.
Programs now even sync files, so even if system fails, all saved games, etc are saved.
Windows does not work that way for games, windows only caches stuff for windows.

Actually, windows caches all files from all sources (see exception below). The more its used, the more likely it is to be cached. that means that it won't cache your entire WoW directory, it will cache the most used file in WoW directory, the most used files in every other game you own, etc.

However, a ramdrive could be used to make a specific application (eg: wow) operate a lot faster at the expense of making everything else a lot slower by making it the only thing being cached

There are several problems with superfetch:
1.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Interviews with MS engineers revealed that initially MS disabled superfetch on all SSDs because they thought it would be unneeded, the performance was terrible! so they reenabled it... and set it to automatically disable if the drive meets a certain minimum random performance that did not exist at the time (and thus was untested but assumed to perform well). We have since reached it so now it will exclude your top of the line SSD from superfetch... which is stupid because ram is still millions of times faster.

2. superfetch is a very low priority process, so it takes a long time for it to actually preload all the data after you restart your computer. Especially if you have lots of RAM for it to fill so it runs out of high priority files and has to limit itself to lower priority files (still works though)

3. You can't ever personally inform superfetch of your wishes or preferences (ex: set wow to high priority), it is 100% automatic algorithm

 

[Deders]

I've had to disable Superfetch on a number of Vista systems just to make the speed bearable.

 

[taltamir]

I've had to disable Superfetch on a number of Vista systems just to make the speed bearable.

That is interesting, never heard of such a case. (then again it is beasta; MS's heaviest most inefficient system ever)
Can you share with us the specs on those systems? and what sped up when you disabled superfetch?

 

[2is]

That is interesting, never heard of such a case. (then again it is beasta; MS's heaviest most inefficient system ever)
Can you share with us the specs on those systems? and what sped up when you disabled superfetch?

You haven't looked hard enough. Vistas implementation of super fetch is horrible causing stupidly long boot times and extensive hard drive thrashing for extended periods of time. I'd say it was by far the biggest performance issue in Vista. Disabling it on a vista box turns it into a whole new machine with a much better experience.

 

[Deders]

That is interesting, never heard of such a case. (then again it is beasta; MS's heaviest most inefficient system ever)
Can you share with us the specs on those systems? and what sped up when you disabled superfetch?

It's generally older systems or systems that were underspecced to run Vista smoothly in the first place. Still way above the minimum spec that microsoft claim, but you know how it is with OS's and software that expand and demand more and more resources. I can't believe they still sell netbooks with only 1GB of ram.

I guess once the superfetch cache gets overloaded it can't really make an informed decision as what data is actually needed so it just ends up swapping data back and forth causing disk thrashing on top of swap file usage.

I find disabling it tends to unclog disk access on systems like this that are low on resources, owned by people who aren't interested in computers to maintain them properly.

 

[taltamir]

Thanks deders.
I guess we can add this as issue number 4 of superfetch than, misbehaves on systems with only 1GB or less of RAM.
Have you seen this on win7 as well or only on vista?

@2is: To be honest I barely see systems with vista. Almost everyone seems to use either XP or win7.

 

[Deders]

I'm sure I had to disable it on at least one machine with 2GB

 

[imaheadcase]

Try to explain that to the genius above...

Hey go ahead believing in fairies if you want, the truth is in the results I get and everyone else who runs the software. Its just hilarious people with so many posts don't understand it.

Ramdisk is used by gamers and non-gamers all the time for increased performance, it takes literally less than 5min to set up, its a no hassle thing to use. You can't lose anything with it, and you get free performance from doing it. Its not like its rocket science, the proof has been around for ages.

Feel free to miss out on the benefits of it, i don't care, just thought people here understood stuff and would like to use it, but guess not.

 

[imaheadcase]

Actually, windows caches all files from all sources (see exception below). The more its used, the more likely it is to be cached. that means that it won't cache your entire WoW directory, it will cache the most used file in WoW directory, the most used files in every other game you own, etc.

However, a ramdrive could be used to make a specific application (eg: wow) operate a lot faster at the expense of making everything else a lot slower by making it the only thing being cached

Not the case at all on a modern system, nothing runs slower. Right now I have ALL of SKyrim in ramdrive, I also have Chrome (little over 1gig with tables), no slowdowns at all. I just don't think people have used a ramdrive in a long time, they have come a long way on ease of use. Its literally pushing a button. When ram prices was so high not many used them, but with it so cheap they came back into favor.

 

[KingFatty]

Not the case at all on a modern system, nothing runs slower. Right now I have ALL of SKyrim in ramdrive, I also have Chrome (little over 1gig with tables), no slowdowns at all. I just don't think people have used a ramdrive in a long time, they have come a long way on ease of use. Its literally pushing a button. When ram prices was so high not many used them, but with it so cheap they came back into favor.

Can you provide some helpful links so I can read about the benefits of using ramdrives on modern Windows 8 systems? I didn't realize this was so popular, so I assume there are some review sites that show the benefits like you are experience (meaning, some objective data that can be reproduced, and not just anecdotal experience and confirmation bias)?

 

[KingFatty]

Also, shouldn't you account for the time it takes to actually load the ram disk initially?

So you can create the ram disk pretty much instantly, but you still have to sit there and copy the data from hard disk to the ram disk. Then you have to turn around and run the program. So wouldn't it be a bit unfair if you never count that aspect as a negative associated with ram disks, you've got to sit there and wait for it to load?

In contrast, there is a similar thing going on when a non-ramdisk system loads the game when launched, it's copied from hard disk into memory for actual use. Now the issue is when this happens, the CPU is needed to decompress stuff and do all kinds of processing, so it's not purely waiting for a hard drive transfer, but instead it's also slowed down via CPU.

So then when you think of the ram disk, wouldn't you just be experiencing slightly more total wait time? You have the first wait while filling up the ram disk, then the second wait while loading the game (which is affected by the CPU). But without a ram disk, it's just doing the loading by itself, and skipping the initial copy from hard drive to ramdisk?

So is that part of it, maybe it's easy to disregard the initial wait to populate the ram disk. I mean, maybe it can be justified based on "hey it's a one-time thing and I never reboot and it's just happening automatically." But if that's the reasoning, couldn't you also apply the very same reasoning to just forget the ram disk, load the game when you boot your computer, and then just don't exit the game, leave it in ram? I mean you have all this ram sitting around... oh well, I mean, you have some bit of ram leftover because most of it is consumed by ramdisks...

 

[taltamir]

Not the case at all on a modern system, nothing runs slower. Right now I have ALL of SKyrim in ramdrive, I also have Chrome (little over 1gig with tables), no slowdowns at all. I just don't think people have used a ramdrive in a long time, they have come a long way on ease of use. Its literally pushing a button. When ram prices was so high not many used them, but with it so cheap they came back into favor.

Try reading my post again, more carefully this time.

 

[Aaronhunt]

Here i wanna suggest you that 4GB N 8GB are fine but 16 GB is too much.
generally we delete data and then we fill the card with other stuff so we are doing soo then i prefer 4GB n 8GB as best.

 

[Fred B]

.
These days, 99% of SSDs are SATA3, meaning you do get lightning fast read speeds out of them. There is no way in hell you could notice a difference in loading times when comparing running a game off SSD vs ramdisk. If you are after wanking your virtual ego, then MAYBE you could notice some difference in numbers when throwing such setups into benchmark software (which does everything but reflecting real world situation).

.

I tryed a ramdisk with loading some gamemaps of bf1942 ,and it is not faster than a good ssd array .The big diffence i get is from the os , XP loads faster than w7 :|
Most users never experienced windows with low ram , lets say 128 MB . Windows goes in a kind of low ram mode , it shuts down ram that isn t esentiel to keep the pc running .No fancy windows , but it keeps on running . The programs used where restricted in use ,but usable . The memory is cheap nowadays so that is the main reason to buy alot .That is a very good thing , better to much as to little. But i think a fast disk iq is more important than having more ram than needed .

 

[Deders]

If I did have enough ram I probably would use a ramdisk to extend my SSD's life.

 

[taq8ojh]

By how much? And why? Do you think 10 or 12 years makes a difference, when you will probably change it much sooner than before half that time passes?

 

[Deders]

I don't really know how long exactly it would last. I know the latest Samsung's are supposed to last 12 years but mine was made before that and I will never know if their calculations will match up to my general day to day use.

I do worry that one day I'm going to switch on my computer and it won't boot, meaning I'll have to go back to using my hard drive if I can't afford another SSD.

 

[taq8ojh]

You should be worried about having general backup of your data rather than lifespan of a SSD really. SSD is unlikely to wear out on you, but data loss can happen anytime with anything.

 

[Jacky60]

I've recently tried disabling my pagefile in Arma 3 with 16gb memory in my machine and I get "windows is out of memory" messages and interrupted gameplay. The map Altis is enormous, 270KM square vs 40KM in Skyrim. I think this is one game where more memory is a very good idea as is a very fast hard drive. Building a 4770 system with 8GB and we'll see how that fares with my ancient Vertex 2 SSD for the page file but I'm pretty sure I'll need a much faster hard drive for the new build and 16GB memory.

 

[Deders]

You should be worried about having general backup of your data rather than lifespan of a SSD really. SSD is unlikely to wear out on you, but data loss can happen anytime with anything.

I'm careful not to put any important data on my SSD, I could re-install tomorrow if I needed too but alas I can't afford another drive to back up anything that is important yet. I know someone is probably going to say but can you afford not to, but I can't even afford a replacement DVD burner right now.

 

[taq8ojh]

Yea, I know the feeling. Noone says anything will fail anytime soon, the chances are pretty low in most situations. It CAN happen, though (and usually in the most unwelcome time), so it's a good idea to keep that in mind in future when you have a few bucks to spare.