How much Ram actually works

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by 335th_GRAthos

No (easy answer for an easy question)


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.