How much Ram actually works
 

I just downloaded Desastersofts latest Adof Galland Fighter Ace campaign and I believe it recommended around 8 gigs of ram.

I'm currently using an Asus PT6 motherboard with 3 - DDR3- 1600 2 gig sticks in Triple Channel Memory format. My only problem with the game is a slight terrain stutter flying at treetop level over London, and wonder if 3 - 4 gig sticks would make any difference.

When I check with CPUZ it appears my memory is running around 2100 NB frequency. So I wonder if it would make a difference putting in DDR3-2000 memory instead of DDR3-1600.

Anyway memory is very cheap, much cheaper than buying a 680 4gig video card.

edit I'm using Windows 7 64bit OS

No (easy answer for an easy question) :D


If you want to read more:
This "slight terrain stutter" (nice definition by the way) is not caused by the lack of RAM but, by the lack of VideoRAM.

You have a GTX580 but you did not mention whether it is a 1.5GbVRAM or, a 3GbVRAM version.

Since you have "slight terrain stutter" over London and I know that over London usage may reach 2,4GbVRAM I presume that you have 1.5GbVRAM version.

The problem is that when the 1.5GbVRAM is full, the game starts unloading textures from the VRAM to make free space and load new textures from the hard disk.

Use a program like NVDIA Inspector to monitor the usage % of your VRAM and the FPS. You may notice that as soon you reach the 95% VRAM usage, your fps drops considerably.

Summarizing, it does not help. You need a very-very good graphics card with 3Gb VRAM and higher. You already have a very good graphics card so I can not advice you to go for a 680GTX, it is too small an advantage and it has not the best memory interface. I can only recommend you to wait (like me) for the next generation (and hope it will be more performant than the current one).






If you have a lot of RAM in your PC, you can create a RAMDISK and load parts of the game in there. This increases performance when the game needs to load textures. An SSD hard disk should bring equal performance gains (but SSD is much more expensive than RAM nowadays) so you have this covered as well already.




Happy Flying
~S~

Thanks for the info. Awhile ago I heard its better to have more than 1.5 vram, but unfortunately my video card has 1.5. I almost hit the buy button on a 680 4gig vram, but it was too hard to rationalize, and still not sure it would fix the problem. I thought I'd look into system ram as its much cheaper. I assumed the sim couldn't load all the terrain textures needed into the video card, and some must come from the ram, and harddrive, so I thought its possible more ram could mean less time to access and hopefully less stutter. That said stutter isn't much a problem on my system, unless I was looking for small ground targets in London, which obviously wouldn't be that often. I just hate even the hint of a stutter.

If I were you, I would look at the price my GTX580 1.5Gb can reach at eBay, calculate the additional money I need to buy a GTX580 3Gb and decide whether the price/value ratio is acceptable or not.

The GTX580 1.5Gb is still one of the best graphics cards of the market.

~S~

Exactly how does the terrain data travel from the harddrive, does all of go thru the system ram to the video card vram, or does some or all go directly from the harddrive to the vram?

I don't know exactly, but I do know that the hard drive is much slower than RAM, and RAM is much slower than the CPU or GPU, so it doesn't really matter that much, the drive is the bottleneck.

But, if the sim can store more data in more and faster system ram, it may take some of the bottleneck of the harddrive out of the equation. Just guessing. Hence my original question.

I do not know the answer to this Chivas but I would say:

#1 the bottleneck is the VRAM on the GPU. As soon as it gets full, problems start. I have seen COD producing "slight terrain stutter" on PCs with small GPUs (512Mb VRAM) much faster than on my PC (1,3Gb VRAM),

#2 my assumption using plain logic is that data will move from the HDD to the CPU first and then to the GPU as the CPU will decide which data needs to be loaded (This is an assumption!).
This may be of interest: http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_3.html

~S~

Thanks for your input, GRAthos. All interesting stuff.