Does DCSW really need more than 4Gb of RAM?

[BigfootMSR]

I have 24GB of ram :)

[msalama]

Yes Whartsell, whether to use swap or not depends entirely on what the machine is running. Works in my case though :)

[MasterZelgadis]

The reason why I have 16 GB of RAM is not a single program like DCS, but more or less other programs that run in the background. So I have a greater buffer. And with the RAM prices, there is no great reason against having a little more RAM. Things evolve quickly, there was a time, where I had 4 MB of RAM and 83 MB of HDD, and that was more than enough.. ;)

[BaD CrC]

Use to run bs1 with 6gb. With bs2 then dscw, I often had the case where win7 aero was disabled because of the lack of ram. Wanted to buy 12gb, then realized that 24gb was ridiculously cheap and bought this kit. Eventhough 24gb is totally useless, it's a matter of good feeling.

I have dcsw, helios, xpadder, sioc, trackir5, ts3 running.

[Gloom Demon]

Well, I have purchased 2x4Gb of RAM and the answer to my question is (orchestra - hit it) Yes and No! I ran a custom mission (without any air or ground units so far, other than myself, so I can still be erroneous in my findings) with 4Gb and with 8Gb and compared the results.

 

No, currently DCSW does not need more than 4Gb of RAM (exhibit 1 and 2 attached). Memory usage with 4Gb and 8Gb of RAM did not change and remains at 3,5 - 3,7Gb.

 

However, I have eliminated a lot of background running processes like Adobe Flash, Reader, Shockwave, Google updaters, SSD monitoring utilities and I do not have stuff like Skype, ICQ and other things automatically start at boot. I also do not have a lot of the other things DCSW pilots use, like TrackIR, for example, Teamspeak and do not host multiplayer games. So if you are not being careful with your memory usage the answer could quite possibly be Yes. Especially if taking into account the upcoming EDGE and other bells and whistles ED might want to throw our way.

 

But currently, for a memory-conscious user, running standalone DCSW - the answer is No DCSW does not require more than 4Gb of RAM - please correct me if I am wrong.

 

P.S. Running FRAPS in 4Gb and 8Gb configurations resulted in an absolutely equal FPS. Disabling Windows pagefile also did not yeild any performance gains.

P.S.S. I know the taskmanager is in Russian, however it is quite visible, that after installing 8Gb of RAM memory usage is still less then half.

Edited August 1, 2013 by Gloom Demon

[ALDEGA]

Don't forget Windows caches data in RAM as well.

In your 4GB configuration, there was barely any RAM left for general data caching, which would increase paging, compared to the 8GB configuration which had plenty of available RAM for caching.

[Gloom Demon]

Paging should have influenced FPS and it did not. Average FPS measured by FRAPS with 4Gb was 63.600, with 8Gb - 63.817 (min and max values were equal - 59 and 69). And then again - disabling the pagefile did not yield anything in terms of performance.

Edited July 31, 2013 by Gloom Demon

[Night]

Hey Gloom, does DCS run well on your system at maximum settings?

[Lao Fei Mao]

You guys shouldn't forget the DCS engine is evolving, I bet some day it really needs more than 4G RAM

Albeit the more usage of RAM is better, but I don't care, what I care is 2+ cpu core support

[Gloom Demon]

Hey Gloom, does DCS run well on your system at maximum settings?

 

I'll run it at maximum settings and get back to you.

[Gloom Demon]

Night With all the settings maxed out (not pressing the High button, but manually maxing them out) and with civ traffic and vsync turned off, while flying a Su-25T low over Tbilisi, without any ground or air units other than me and with Shkval turned on and pointed at the ground, FRAPS shows an average framerate of 40.567 (min 38 max 43).

 

Reducing ground clutter to 0, tree rendering distance to 6000, AA to 16x instead of 16xQ and MFD display to 512 every frame yeilds an average FPS of 51.117 (min 48 max 55). These are the settings I play at. However, in a mission with other units, or multiplayer, this could change.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Gloom Demon