How much Ram actually works

[Chivas]

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?

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by Chivas

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.

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

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.

[335th_GRAthos]

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~

[Chivas]

Thanks for your input, GRAthos. All interesting stuff.