What does more memory do?

Discussion in 'Community Workshop' started by Riverside, May 2, 2016.

  1. Riverside

    Riverside Well-Known Member

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    I need to add RAM to my PC running Raceroom for unrelated reason, and wonder what if anything would improve in the game after I do it? what should I look for taking advantage of it?

    I am moving from 8gb to 16gb, not the graphics card, base RAM; will there be less lag? faster refresh of additional cars?

    Just curious; thanks in advance
     
  2. digitizer

    digitizer Well-Known Member

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    If i'm not wrong R3E is 32bit and can't use more then 4Gb
     
  3. Mich Angel

    Mich Angel Well-Known Member

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    In short and a very simplistic description of what more ram does is, if you for ex. have half of ram what your motherboard have as maximum then the CPU's 100% max is only 50% of what it really can perform so basically more memory give the cpu more power to operate.
    Maxing out the memory is actually more important to achieve max performance than maxing out the CPU frequency speed, something many do wrong to get it faster.
     
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  4. digitizer

    digitizer Well-Known Member

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    I think this incorrect or very, very simplistic. For ex. My computer have 12Gb RAM and officially can hold 64Gb max (128Gb unofficially). My CPU work for only ~ 20% now ?
     
  5. Mich Angel

    Mich Angel Well-Known Member

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    Yes it is very simplistic description and that is actually how it is, of course the cpu run at 100% but to achieve the maxed out performance it is going to use HDD swap mem for when that motherboards mem is not enough making it slower than it have to be, for HDD swap memory is never going to be as fast as the ram is so the more ram you got the more performance you get from the cpu.

    Edit: if you put in 64GB of ram in your computer if that is untweeked max you would see some serious performance from your computer, so if you think it is fast now, try to max ram out and you will be surprised of how fast it become compared to what it is now.
     
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    Last edited: May 2, 2016
  6. digitizer

    digitizer Well-Known Member

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    Yes of course. RAM never can't be enough :) But i have my system installed on SSD instead HDD, this give me a lot of additional perfomance
     
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  7. Mich Angel

    Mich Angel Well-Known Member

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    Yea that is a sheeper and work fairly ok to achive more preformance, that's how I have done to, since ram is a lot more expencive than upgrading to SSD drives ;)

    EDIT: But I will max out ram asap I can aford it ;) and I always recomend doing so before any other upgrade to make a computer faster, that is to focus on the ram first.
     
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  8. digitizer

    digitizer Well-Known Member

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    Yes, its why i'm waiting. I need to buy 4x16Gb RAM modules and this very expensive to my computer. I don't want upgrade it step by step, because imo its money down the drain
     
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  9. Mich Angel

    Mich Angel Well-Known Member

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    Yea I think that is a good way to look at it and more or less how I would do it to, save up and put in all ram at once than bit by bit..
     
  10. Tuborg

    Tuborg Well-Known Member

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  11. Riverside

    Riverside Well-Known Member

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    Thank you all for taking the time to share and discuss what you know about this; it does sound to me like, although more is good when it comes to RAM, I should not expect miracles specifically in Raceroom coming out of the upgrade and that if, in example I want to see a faster screen that will go on to the refresh rate of the monitor and the power of the g card...

    Much appreciated....
     
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  12. pixeljetstream

    pixeljetstream Well-Known Member Beta tester

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    btw unless you really do memory intensive work with lots of data (thinking workstation like applications) there is no need for so much RAM. One benefits a bit from having more than needed to keep windows and background services happy, however most games will not make use of a lot of RAM, given they are written against lower limits, consoles... (even when they are 64-bit) and manage the streaming of data well.

    There is no "magic" that makes an app use more RAM well. Hence SSD is typically best bang per buck (assuming you already have something like 8 GB RAM).

    That's why you better have applications and usages that make use of that RAM, otherwise waste of money (especially going beyond 16 GB).
     
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  13. ElNino

    ElNino Well-Known Member

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    ^^^^ What @pixeljetstream said. If you check benchmarks, sometime adding a ridiculous amount of ram will actually slow down performance. As long as you have the recommended amount of ram for a game (which means not caching from HDD), adding RAM beyond that will rarely if ever increase performance. I wish it did. Unfortunately we are not video editing here so there is no use.
     
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