Does PC really use virtual memory?

[Gennaios]

with 8gb of ram todays games use all of it so i thought about using virtual ram!
ingame still loads 8gb of ram not more so whats the deal with virtual ram where is it useful?thnx

 

[aquielisunari]

I'm confused by the terminology. When I think of Virtual RAM I think of Virtual RAM, pafefile or swap file. Pladin talks about like a RAM drive which is going the complete opposite way. Creating a RAM Disk can increase performance. On the other side of the coin is a pagefile which can negatively impact gameplay.

MSI AfterBurner has an OSD that you can disable. One resource you can monitor is the pagefile BUT if you are looking to create a RAM disk I am way off base.

 

[CountMike]

Virtual memory (RAM) is used by OS to (temporarily)write on disk whatever doesn't fit in actual free RAM, It can significantly lower performance because disk (even SSD) is much slower than RAM and process use some more resources. It's useful for running more programs at same time but at a cost of performance.

 

[Pinhedd]

I'm confused by the terminology. When I think of Virtual RAM I think of Virtual RAM, pafefile or swap file. Pladin talks about like a RAM drive which is going the complete opposite way. Creating a RAM Disk can increase performance. On the other side of the coin is a pagefile which can negatively impact gameplay.

MSI AfterBurner has an OSD that you can disable. One resource you can monitor is the pagefile BUT if you are looking to create a RAM disk I am way off base.

Paladin's post was so blatantly nonsensical that I had to delete it.

Virtual memory is an abstraction technique that gives each running process its own address space. From the perspective of the running program, it has the computer to itself. It cannot interfere with other processes unless a section of memory is explicitly shared between them. The microprocessor translates virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses automatically.

There are several methods of implementing virtual memory, but the overwhelmingly dominant method is called paging. I go into great detail in a tutorial that I wrote several years ago so I will not repeat myself.

Most microprocessors and operating systems implement paging in such a way that pages of virtual memory can be ejected from physical memory and written to secondary storage. When a virtual address is referenced that, when translated, is not present in physical memory, it will be loaded from the hard disk back into memory. This process is called page swapping.

99.9% of the time that someone refers to virtual memory they are in fact referring to page swapping. These threads inevitably get filled up with useless guesswork by well meaning folks that unfortunately have no idea what they are talking about.