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Well, I hope this is the right place to discuss a disagreement between me and the author (Igor ...):
You've stated that the graphics devices' memory isn't copied to the system memory, but I learned otherwise from my 3D programming experience. Let's agree on a few things, shall we?
■Available memory adresses (all 2^(16/32/64) off 'em) are distributed to any memory areas that need a system wide calling name. This will mostly be VRAM and RAM, with some minor stuff like PCI and the BIOS settings chips begging for them.
■The above is the reason for the unability to use more than around 3.5GiB (yes, the real exponential ones) of the 4GiB of available pointers: your CPU, limited by the OS or any other way around has run out of names (pointers) to call them. No adress space is left. The names that would we distributed to RAM is used by other more important parts like VRAM and BIOS. The only partial solution is PAE, which ups the limit of virtual space to 2^36 (64GiB).
■Graphics card memory is used for vertex- and index buffers, together with textures, tesselation buffers, pre-ROP-frames (waiting for AA for example) and one post-ROP-frame (when using the DISCARD swap effect, quite a common one, even the required one for any AA type). And a few Effect Files too.
If that's correct, please explain to me why this is 'wrong' then:
■Assigning the storage flag 'D3DPOOL_MANAGED' (quite a common one, even the usual one) to device::CreateSomeMemoryEatingResource() first moves the resource to RAM and automatically moves the resource to VRAM when it's being used with stuff like SetTexture() or DrawIndexedPrimitive() for speedy access by the GPU.
■A copy of these resources is kept in system memory (when using that flag) as a backup. Should the device loose track of what it's doing due to losing focus or any other spooky reason (and fail to recover it's VRAM) the backup will be copied back to VRAM.
At least, that's what I learned from real lessons, books like 'Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct X 9.0c: A Shader Approach' and online tutorials. I hope you'll be able to clarify all about this.
-------------------------------------------------------
And for the other discussion about what's enough to disable the page file: I've been using 2GiB + 1GiB disk (yes, DDR3 was expensive back then, about €30/GiB) ever since okt. 2009, played the toughest games like Crysis, Prototype, FSX and Dragon Age and even did quite a lot of rendering using Mental Ray in 3dsMax drawing up to a milion faces in the viewport, and I never ever encountered any problems with crashing when thinking properly about memory usage of the renderer. Of course it isn't hard to make 3dsMax crash with some overkill smoothing, but that's not what we're talking about. A.t.m. (excluding chrome) 32 processes are running (wireless and the printer still work
) and Windows itself uses about 400MiB of memory. So yes, I've you're a diehard tweaker, even 4GiB will be enough.
It is indeed a waste if you've got a 64bit Windows lying around somewhere and don't hesitate to upgrade.
But the point of it is that with PAE you can use up to 2^36 bytes of RAM (64GiB) as virtual memory. That means that the page file can be as huge as 64GiB. But the old fashioned page file is stored on the HDD, which is damned slow compared to RAM (more than 100x as slow using sequential tests and in my case 318181x (14ms/44ns) slower when comparing access time). This way, you can store that page file (with its almost unlimited size) on RAM.
And yes, as any capacitor-based memory does, your data goes up in [strike]smoke[/strike] electrons when power is cut off.
You've stated that the graphics devices' memory isn't copied to the system memory, but I learned otherwise from my 3D programming experience. Let's agree on a few things, shall we?
■Available memory adresses (all 2^(16/32/64) off 'em) are distributed to any memory areas that need a system wide calling name. This will mostly be VRAM and RAM, with some minor stuff like PCI and the BIOS settings chips begging for them.
■The above is the reason for the unability to use more than around 3.5GiB (yes, the real exponential ones) of the 4GiB of available pointers: your CPU, limited by the OS or any other way around has run out of names (pointers) to call them. No adress space is left. The names that would we distributed to RAM is used by other more important parts like VRAM and BIOS. The only partial solution is PAE, which ups the limit of virtual space to 2^36 (64GiB).
■Graphics card memory is used for vertex- and index buffers, together with textures, tesselation buffers, pre-ROP-frames (waiting for AA for example) and one post-ROP-frame (when using the DISCARD swap effect, quite a common one, even the required one for any AA type). And a few Effect Files too.
If that's correct, please explain to me why this is 'wrong' then:
■Assigning the storage flag 'D3DPOOL_MANAGED' (quite a common one, even the usual one) to device::CreateSomeMemoryEatingResource() first moves the resource to RAM and automatically moves the resource to VRAM when it's being used with stuff like SetTexture() or DrawIndexedPrimitive() for speedy access by the GPU.
■A copy of these resources is kept in system memory (when using that flag) as a backup. Should the device loose track of what it's doing due to losing focus or any other spooky reason (and fail to recover it's VRAM) the backup will be copied back to VRAM.
At least, that's what I learned from real lessons, books like 'Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct X 9.0c: A Shader Approach' and online tutorials. I hope you'll be able to clarify all about this.
-------------------------------------------------------
And for the other discussion about what's enough to disable the page file: I've been using 2GiB + 1GiB disk (yes, DDR3 was expensive back then, about €30/GiB) ever since okt. 2009, played the toughest games like Crysis, Prototype, FSX and Dragon Age and even did quite a lot of rendering using Mental Ray in 3dsMax drawing up to a milion faces in the viewport, and I never ever encountered any problems with crashing when thinking properly about memory usage of the renderer. Of course it isn't hard to make 3dsMax crash with some overkill smoothing, but that's not what we're talking about. A.t.m. (excluding chrome) 32 processes are running (wireless and the printer still work
) and Windows itself uses about 400MiB of memory. So yes, I've you're a diehard tweaker, even 4GiB will be enough.It is indeed a waste if you've got a 64bit Windows lying around somewhere and don't hesitate to upgrade.
But the point of it is that with PAE you can use up to 2^36 bytes of RAM (64GiB) as virtual memory. That means that the page file can be as huge as 64GiB. But the old fashioned page file is stored on the HDD, which is damned slow compared to RAM (more than 100x as slow using sequential tests and in my case 318181x (14ms/44ns) slower when comparing access time). This way, you can store that page file (with its almost unlimited size) on RAM.
And yes, as any capacitor-based memory does, your data goes up in [strike]smoke[/strike] electrons when power is cut off.
Guess this finally debunks that you shouldn't use ram for swap file myth that's been going around for years though for a 64bit OS it's a more complicated issue as there is no real reasoning to do so.
More than 4GB of ram is still largely useless though for most users it's better to go for higher bandwidth lower latency ram.
What I'd really like to see in the future is a CUDA or OpenCL based ramdisk for video cards which have lots of ram on them.
It could get around memory capacity limitations on your motherboard a bit plus the ram on them is faster than standard ram in most cases.
More than 4GB of ram is still largely useless though for most users it's better to go for higher bandwidth lower latency ram.
What I'd really like to see in the future is a CUDA or OpenCL based ramdisk for video cards which have lots of ram on them.
It could get around memory capacity limitations on your motherboard a bit plus the ram on them is faster than standard ram in most cases.
gm0n3y
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- Mar 13, 2006
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Hmm, I'm running 64bit windows with an AMD6870 and only 2GB of RAM. I didn't realize that it made that much of a difference in gaming. I want to upgrade, but buying more DDR2 seems like a waste, maybe its time to take the plunge and buy new MB/CPU/RAM.
Gin Fushicho
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- Mar 11, 2009
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Wonderful article, I'd love to have more memory now, I used to think it was useless, but I have been getting problems with missing or late textures a lot lately, so it would be nice to have a tad bit more RAM.
Gascogne
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- Dec 30, 2008
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[citation][nom]iam2thecrowe[/nom]As some people dont seem to understand what the article is about, ill try explain some key points i liked 2. Using the same allocating ram to ramdisk for swap file technique can also help in 64 bit systems with 8gb or more ram, speeding up loading times. 3. Some games do make use of more ram, not as in framerate, but loading times and also corrupt textures can be caused by not enough video ram &/or system ram (this was surprising to me and may help others diagnose what they think is a video card issue, may be a RAM issue)[/citation]
I must say that the article is little confusing..
They say one needs atleast 8Gb in order to turn off paging file?
I have been using 6Gb (tripple channel) and no paging file for almost two years now (had 3 ssd in raid 0 as well), zero crashes.
Will my system get any improvements in games if I upgraded to 12Gb of ram?
Asus P6T Deluxe
i7 920 @ 4Ghz
OCZ Platinum XTC 6Gb @ 1707Mhz
nVidia GTX 580
Vertex 30Gb x 3 in raid 0
Velociraptor 320Gb
Asus Xonar Essence STX
I must say that the article is little confusing..
They say one needs atleast 8Gb in order to turn off paging file?
I have been using 6Gb (tripple channel) and no paging file for almost two years now (had 3 ssd in raid 0 as well), zero crashes.
Will my system get any improvements in games if I upgraded to 12Gb of ram?
Asus P6T Deluxe
i7 920 @ 4Ghz
OCZ Platinum XTC 6Gb @ 1707Mhz
nVidia GTX 580
Vertex 30Gb x 3 in raid 0
Velociraptor 320Gb
Asus Xonar Essence STX
Spartanrevenge
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- Jul 23, 2010
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I have 4GB of RAM and I moved my page file to a flash drive. I knowmthat this shortens the life of the drive, but since their so cheap, i intend to replace it every 6 months or so.
SteelCity1981
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And it's about time rams prices fell this time last year you would be paying almost 300 dollars for 8gb of ram.
hawkwindeb
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- Jul 14, 2006
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[citation][nom]blibba[/nom]....and the memory on your graphics card is far faster than elsewhere in your system.[/citation]
Agree with you on all points, but to nitpick, even GDDR5 is slower than any of the cache in your CPU ie: L1, L2, L3) which is of course in your system
Agree with you on all points, but to nitpick, even GDDR5 is slower than any of the cache in your CPU ie: L1, L2, L3) which is of course in your system
[citation][nom]doyletdude[/nom]Hmmm... i'm concerned because i use triple channel so i'm currently at 6gb, which is under recommendation however to upgrade to 12gb might be to much, especially since i've heard that using more RAM slots negativley affects overclocking stability.[/citation]
I think this is only an issue if you are trying to break OC records. For those of us who run our overclocked PCs day after day, 12 GB of a good quality memory isn't going to make it that much harder to keep an overclock, given proper cooling. Certainly I've had no problems running my my Core i7 920 @ 4.1 GHz for the better part of 2 years with 12GB of 1600MHz Patriot memory.
I think this is only an issue if you are trying to break OC records. For those of us who run our overclocked PCs day after day, 12 GB of a good quality memory isn't going to make it that much harder to keep an overclock, given proper cooling. Certainly I've had no problems running my my Core i7 920 @ 4.1 GHz for the better part of 2 years with 12GB of 1600MHz Patriot memory.
K2N hater
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[citation][nom]Gascogne[/nom]I must say that the article is little confusing..They say one needs atleast 8Gb in order to turn off paging file?I have been using 6Gb (tripple channel) and no paging file for almost two years now (had 3 ssd in raid 0 as well), zero crashes.[/citation]
It tends to vary. A typical office box runs XP with swap file set to 0MB even with less than 1GB RAM. But that 8GB doesn't come out of nothing... It tells users without the knowledge on the subject that they shouldn't try that with low RAM as it has the potential to crash the system even before it finishes loading.
It tends to vary. A typical office box runs XP with swap file set to 0MB even with less than 1GB RAM. But that 8GB doesn't come out of nothing... It tells users without the knowledge on the subject that they shouldn't try that with low RAM as it has the potential to crash the system even before it finishes loading.
[citation][nom]iam2thecrowe[/nom]As some people dont seem to understand what the article is about, ill try explain some key points i liked - 1. a 32 bit OS CAN use more than 3.25gb ram if the extra ram is made into a ramdisk and used for the swap file, which will speed up loading times, and save your hard disk for other things. 2. Using the same allocating ram to ramdisk for swap file technique can also help in 64 bit systems with 8gb or more ram, speeding up loading times. 3. Some games do make use of more ram, not as in framerate, but loading times and also corrupt textures can be caused by not enough video ram &/or system ram (this was surprising to me and may help others diagnose what they think is a video card issue, may be a RAM issue)[/citation]
I think it's important to emphasize that you aren't making the operating system address more RAM; you are turning the RAM on your mainboard into a hard drive. It's like a super-fast SSD that loses it's memory when the power is turned off.
I think it's important to emphasize that you aren't making the operating system address more RAM; you are turning the RAM on your mainboard into a hard drive. It's like a super-fast SSD that loses it's memory when the power is turned off.
wolfram23
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Good read. Glad to have 8gb.
I don't see the point of disabling file swap, ever. When I upgraded to 8gb, my file swap size plumetted, now only at 125mb or so. I also then upgraded to an SSD and some of the optimization guides say to disable the file paging. Nah... it's tiny, and fast. And stable.
I don't see the point of disabling file swap, ever. When I upgraded to 8gb, my file swap size plumetted, now only at 125mb or so. I also then upgraded to an SSD and some of the optimization guides say to disable the file paging. Nah... it's tiny, and fast. And stable.
Newegg must love you guys! Last time you got me with a trio of ASUS VW266H LCDs, this time it's another 4GB of RAM (especially needed since I'm now lighting up over 6.9 million pixels). And let's not forget the pair of Radeon 5850s you sold me on before that. Oh but it's all so glorious now, thanks guys for all the awesome work you do!
MU_Engineer
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- Feb 18, 2006
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[citation][nom]nforce4max[/nom]Try doing 16GB on a DDR2 machine, it isn't cheap $400-500 usd.[/citation]
16 GB using four 4 GB dual-rank unbuffered non-ECC desktop modules costs about $240 with JEDEC-standard DDR3-1333 and $340 for DDR2-800, looking at the prices on Newegg.com. Sure, an extra hundred bucks in your pocket is great, but it's not enough to really cause you to want to abandon an otherwise perfectly serviceable DDR2-using platform.
16 GB using four 4 GB dual-rank unbuffered non-ECC desktop modules costs about $240 with JEDEC-standard DDR3-1333 and $340 for DDR2-800, looking at the prices on Newegg.com. Sure, an extra hundred bucks in your pocket is great, but it's not enough to really cause you to want to abandon an otherwise perfectly serviceable DDR2-using platform.
SteelCity1981
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weatherdude
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Wow, the amount of RAM that is worked with in this article is staggering to me. I built my PC in 2008 with 2 GiB of RAM and 32-bit Windows XP and disabled the page file. My system ran flawlessly since then.
That is until Civilization V came out and ate all my memory forcing me to add another gigabyte.
That is until Civilization V came out and ate all my memory forcing me to add another gigabyte.
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