We Need a New RAM Management for the Game Engine!

[_UnknownCheater_]

I have 64g ram with RTX2080Ti,still random crash and fps drop.Do not tell me add the virtual memory or pagefile, that's a fking old useless option.The pagefile of windows was never intended to prevent memory leaks, nor increase the available memory. It's a relic from the past when we only had 256Mb of RAM, not 64Gigs in 2022!.The ED only knows make some newsletters to let the players pay money for them, don't know optimize it's basic game engine! It's 2022,the game's engine RAM management I think still stuck at 20st century!The map must be full loaded to RAM and no dynamic free!WTF!This is a large game has 100Gigs,If ED wanna put the full game all load into the RAM someday,we need 128Gigs RAM and more!

[_UnknownCheater_]

The map be full cached in your RAM,if u change ur map,DCS will clean the certain map's cache and load next map.So you check the Task manager saw dcs not use full RAM but the RAM is full.Sometimes the previous map cache won't full cleaned,if u wanna play next map with big mission you had better relaunch the game.Not only the map will full cached to RAM,all units on the map will full load in to the RAM one time!So I want a dynamic RAM release!Like FS2020, I think the units on its map not less than DCS,but it has a good RAM management. But it is a new game,so we just need a good RAM management for DCS.

Edited February 7, 2022 by zhouyut001

[okopanja]

Win 10 compresses RAM. I have 2070 and 64gb. Normally DCS uses 33GB, but I caught windows compressing 6GB RAM! I did not yet try to disable it. Beside, I have visual studio + atom in the background.

Also check hyperthreading vs no hyperthteading.

Edited February 7, 2022 by okopanja

[Cathnan]

DCS uses a ton of RAM, but saying it loads the full map into it makes no sense at all. Was flying over Syria yesterday withoug pagefile being used and DCS consuming a little over 11GB. IIRC Syria is more than 20GB. I had 11GB of available RAM left. Sure it was a simple mission. This is just to say that DCS doesn't load all of the map into RAM. And there is no reason to do it as well.

[Mars Exulte]

Thank you for your submission to ''Rant of the Week''. This is a good attempt, hits the main points of hyperbole and poor proofreading, but does not have NEARLY enough exclamations. You really need to make us FEEL your angst and in text, that is best done with exclamation marks, preferably with a few ''1s'' slipped in to indicate your finger slipping off the shift key in the heat of your emotion. Better luck next time! Ok, ladies and gentlemen, our next contender is already stepping up, he's nice and sweaty and appears to have keyboard indentations on his forehead, I'm really excited to see how this unfolds! Let's tune in now...

[Worrazen]

It's all about VRAM first and foremost, VRAM amounts are lagging behind due to the DRAM industry production bottlenecks, otherwise we'd already have 32GBs on these cards as per standard, and that would be enough to basically put one of the DCS maps fully into VRAM, but heavily depends on maps, with 32GB perhaps you could do that (I'm not on a system with DCS installed right now, so I can't have a quick check)

RAM usage for gaming is in many cases as cache for VRAM data, graphics and texture data that the system needs in VRAM, but they either can't fit there, or aren't immediately necessary. So a high or low RAM usage isn't of a concern, there's no need to unnecessairly cache more unneeded graphics data into RAM, while VRAM is already being 100% utilized.

The OP's GPU has 8GB VRAM and this isn't that much anymore, I have 8GB too and DCS's maps and everything would like to have much more if it could. Ofcourse VRAM alone doesn't mean that's the only blame for the OPs stuttering, we all know DCS is of a dire need to take advantage of modern software approaches in terms of multi-threading, resource management and graphics, which would enable a smoother experience even with not so optimal hardware resources. Most of the stuttering is actually more to do with CPU stuff than memory in my opinion. But yes, generally, we all know that software really should not stutter under a bit of resource constrain, if it's built to scale, if it has the ability to dynamically adjust it's output, but in a simulator you can't just not display an airplane or piece of land, it would look totally unrealistic, not to mention multiplayer unfairness if low-end users would see a less-detailed world and get some kind of an advantage, like seeing through forrest area or for, various environmental effects, etc.

It might be interesting to see the comparison if for example you'd have game (DCS) debug and the OS too and disable RAM caching and just let the system deal with limited VRAM. However it be much worse on HDD and slow SSD storages than it would be today with fast NVMe SSDs, so either way it's not so bad like in the old days, but still ofcourse much less playable, any kind of stuttering can ruin the experience 10 fold.

Either way RAM exchange has to happen on PCs because when you read new texture data from Storage, it has to go to RAM first, decompressed/converted by CPU before it can go to VRAM, but that's what DirectStorage is for, the data still has to go through RAM but the transport stack is apparently new and highly optimized for that VRAM upload to be much faster and the cost of GPU decompression is apparently much lesser as GPUs chrunch through that like nothing.

 

 

Edited February 9, 2022 by Worrazen

[Migratingcoconut]

On 2/9/2022 at 4:29 AM, Worrazen said:

-snip-

 

So this is something I have wondered about for a long time. My only issue in the whole game is that if I load into multiple maps without shutting the game down, it just guzzles my RAM usage till it crashes/freezes my pc. I do not understand why it cannot just dump the info when I exit the Mission Editor. Furthermore within one long sitting in the ME it will eventually do the same (cache in ram until no more is left available and crash). Does the game just need a RAM cleaner? One we can configure?

My system has a GTX 1080 which is old now, and it's got that 8 GIGs of VRAM. CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K. 16GB RAM. Running DCS on a PCie 3.0 1TB NVME SSD. 

Lastly: Is DirectStorage something I have to turn on? I'm not sure if I have it.

[Worrazen]

Yeah there is room for improvement in garbage collection, but it's general problem due to programming it self, C++ is such a programming language that requires manual garbage collection, it has to be programmed in, every bit of it.

Don't worry about the "Standby Memory" or "RAM Cache", that's not the memory that will cause crashing, this is kept intentionally uncleaned by the OS or applications so that the next reads are faster. It get confusing if you try to dig deeper, it's a lot more complicated and the terminology doesn't mean what you'd first think it means, and it isn't consistent across the back-ends and GUI which adds to the confusion. If you fire up something else it'll drop unnecessary things automatically (it has some kind of an algortightm and rules which things to dump first, but I don't know how that is determined).

If you get an actual crash you should report it, and record it or screenshot it, preferrably have multiple diagnostic utilities opened (process explorer, process hacker, task manager memory) while taking the screenshot when it crashed, and any error messages DCS might show.

For DirectStorage, it's only for newer HW with updated Win10 and Win11, you don't need to turn it off, but you can't enabled it on games that don't support it, the developers have to patch games to add DirectStorage support. Either way DirectStorage won't work at full speed on Windows 10.

 

[SkateZilla]

On 2/6/2022 at 10:35 PM, zhouyut001 said:

I have 64g ram with RTX2080Ti,still random crash and fps drop.Do not tell me add the virtual memory or pagefile, that's a fking old useless option.The pagefile of windows was never intended to prevent memory leaks, nor increase the available memory. It's a relic from the past when we only had 256Mb of RAM, not 64Gigs in 2022!.The ED only knows make some newsletters to let the players pay money for them, don't know optimize it's basic game engine! It's 2022,the game's engine RAM management I think still stuck at 20st century!The map must be full loaded to RAM and no dynamic free!WTF!This is a large game has 100Gigs,If ED wanna put the full game all load into the RAM someday,we need 128Gigs RAM and more!

if it's trying to load the whole map into your memory, your pre-load radius option is set too high, I would advise lowering it.

12 hours ago, Worrazen said:

Yeah there is room for improvement in garbage collection, but it's general problem due to programming it self, C++ is such a programming language that requires manual garbage collection, it has to be programmed in, every bit of it.

Don't worry about the "Standby Memory" or "RAM Cache", that's not the memory that will cause crashing, this is kept intentionally uncleaned by the OS or applications so that the next reads are faster. It get confusing if you try to dig deeper, it's a lot more complicated and the terminology doesn't mean what you'd first think it means, and it isn't consistent across the back-ends and GUI which adds to the confusion. If you fire up something else it'll drop unnecessary things automatically (it has some kind of an algortightm and rules which things to dump first, but I don't know how that is determined).

If you get an actual crash you should report it, and record it or screenshot it, preferrably have multiple diagnostic utilities opened (process explorer, process hacker, task manager memory) while taking the screenshot when it crashed, and any error messages DCS might show.

For DirectStorage, it's only for newer HW with updated Win10 and Win11, you don't need to turn it off, but you can't enabled it on games that don't support it, the developers have to patch games to add DirectStorage support. Either way DirectStorage won't work at full speed on Windows 10.

 

 

15 hours ago, Migratingcoconut said:

So this is something I have wondered about for a long time. My only issue in the whole game is that if I load into multiple maps without shutting the game down, it just guzzles my RAM usage till it crashes/freezes my pc. I do not understand why it cannot just dump the info when I exit the Mission Editor. Furthermore within one long sitting in the ME it will eventually do the same (cache in ram until no more is left available and crash). Does the game just need a RAM cleaner? One we can configure?

My system has a GTX 1080 which is old now, and it's got that 8 GIGs of VRAM. CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K. 16GB RAM. Running DCS on a PCie 3.0 1TB NVME SSD. 

Lastly: Is DirectStorage something I have to turn on? I'm not sure if I have it.

 

On 2/9/2022 at 5:29 AM, Worrazen said:

It's all about VRAM first and foremost, VRAM amounts are lagging behind due to the DRAM industry production bottlenecks, otherwise we'd already have 32GBs on these cards as per standard, and that would be enough to basically put one of the DCS maps fully into VRAM, but heavily depends on maps, with 32GB perhaps you could do that (I'm not on a system with DCS installed right now, so I can't have a quick check)

RAM usage for gaming is in many cases as cache for VRAM data, graphics and texture data that the system needs in VRAM, but they either can't fit there, or aren't immediately necessary. So a high or low RAM usage isn't of a concern, there's no need to unnecessairly cache more unneeded graphics data into RAM, while VRAM is already being 100% utilized.

The OP's GPU has 8GB VRAM and this isn't that much anymore, I have 8GB too and DCS's maps and everything would like to have much more if it could. Ofcourse VRAM alone doesn't mean that's the only blame for the OPs stuttering, we all know DCS is of a dire need to take advantage of modern software approaches in terms of multi-threading, resource management and graphics, which would enable a smoother experience even with not so optimal hardware resources. Most of the stuttering is actually more to do with CPU stuff than memory in my opinion. But yes, generally, we all know that software really should not stutter under a bit of resource constrain, if it's built to scale, if it has the ability to dynamically adjust it's output, but in a simulator you can't just not display an airplane or piece of land, it would look totally unrealistic, not to mention multiplayer unfairness if low-end users would see a less-detailed world and get some kind of an advantage, like seeing through forrest area or for, various environmental effects, etc.

It might be interesting to see the comparison if for example you'd have game (DCS) debug and the OS too and disable RAM caching and just let the system deal with limited VRAM. However it be much worse on HDD and slow SSD storages than it would be today with fast NVMe SSDs, so either way it's not so bad like in the old days, but still ofcourse much less playable, any kind of stuttering can ruin the experience 10 fold.

Either way RAM exchange has to happen on PCs because when you read new texture data from Storage, it has to go to RAM first, decompressed/converted by CPU before it can go to VRAM, but that's what DirectStorage is for, the data still has to go through RAM but the transport stack is apparently new and highly optimized for that VRAM upload to be much faster and the cost of GPU decompression is apparently much lesser as GPUs chrunch through that like nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

DCS is moving to Vulkan, DirectStorage is a DirectX/12 Feature.

Edited February 25, 2022 by SkateZilla