How much memory is optimal?

[johnwhelan]

18 core xeon CPU, RTX 3080, currently it has 32 gigs but I have some spare memory that could push it up to 128 gigs.

Any thoughts?

Thanks John

 

[pdkoester]

If you have it on hand, try it out, see if it really makes a difference. Report back here the results.

 

[paulper]

I’ve not noticed any difference between having 16, 32 or 64 gigs, so I doubt 128 will make any difference.

 

[wilts747]

I'm not sure it will make a lot of difference to Trainz if any at all, but if you are multi-tasking, editing video in the background for example go for it. It's not going to cost you anything and can be easily removed should you want it for another job. Peter

 

[johnwhelan]

I’ve not noticed any difference between having 16, 32 or 64 gigs, so I doubt 128 will make any difference.

That would be my thoughts as well. Still I might as well plug it in to keep it safe.

Thanks John

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Is this more about bragging rights than performance or safety?

 

[johnwhelan]

Is this more about bragging rights than performance or safety?

The machine is about four years old, the video card is rtx 3 not rtx5 so no, it is about what to do with 128 gigs of ddr4 memory I have come into possession of accidently and wondering what to do with it.

Cheerio John

 

[wreeder]

The YouTube channel Dawid does Tech Stuff did a video last year where he examines the issue of how much memory Triple A games will actually use during game play. He concluded that few games use more than 16 GB of ram. Of course, Trainz is not a normal game where memory usage is carefully planned out by the dev team. You could have a route with thousands of assets that need to be loaded into memory. And of course with modern versions of Trainz, how much memory your GPU card has is more of a limiting factor than system ram would be. The current school of thought seems to be that GPU cards need more than 8 GB memory to run modern Triple A games at their highest settings.

 

[pdkoester]

The YouTube channel Dawid does Tech Stuff did a video last year where he examines the issue of how much memory Triple A games will actually use during game play. He concluded that few games use more than 16 GB of ram. Of course, Trainz is not a normal game where memory usage is carefully planned out by the dev team. You could have a route with thousands of assets that need to be loaded into memory. And of course with modern versions of Trainz, how much memory your GPU card has is more of a limiting factor than system ram would be. The current school of thought seems to be that GPU cards need more than 8 GB memory to run modern Triple A games at their highest settings.

True, but 8GB does work fine for a lot of things still.

 

[johnwhelan]

The YouTube channel Dawid does Tech Stuff did a video last year where he examines the issue of how much memory Triple A games will actually use during game play. He concluded that few games use more than 16 GB of ram. Of course, Trainz is not a normal game where memory usage is carefully planned out by the dev team. You could have a route with thousands of assets that need to be loaded into memory. And of course with modern versions of Trainz, how much memory your GPU card has is more of a limiting factor than system ram would be. The current school of thought seems to be that GPU cards need more than 8 GB memory to run modern Triple A games at their highest settings.

I think if I was buying a new video card then I'd look for 16 gigs of memory but for the moment I'll make do with the ten gigs on the card. Why ten gigs I've no idea. In theory the operating system won't report using more memory than Trainz actually uses but it should cache the hard drive into memory which might make things load a bit faster.

Cheerio John

 

[grazlash]

You can do more things faster in Trainz with more memory. I increased my RAM to 32gb to allow me to merge large routes up to 2.5gb without failing, it also had the benefit of making Trainz operate more smoothly. I know of at least one person who says 64gb is the best amount of memory and he creates extremely large routes.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Can you install the new memory incrementally or is it all in one huge block?

If incrementally, you could devise some performance tests involving Trainz (eg. load time of some huge route, EDBR time, frame rate etc) and plot those metrics against total memory size. It would be interesting to see if performance increases monotonically or if it plateaus out, or maybe finds a maximum and starts to decrease after that due to the cost of keeping track of so many addresses.

 

[johnwhelan]

Can you install the new memory incrementally or is it all in one huge block?

If incrementally, you could devise some performance tests involving Trainz (eg. load time of some huge route, EDBR time, frame rate etc) and plot those metrics against total memory size. It would be interesting to see if performance increases monotonically or if it plateaus out, or maybe finds a maximum and starts to decrease after that due to the cost of keeping track of so many addresses.

I have eight slots in the machine, four 8 gig modules in one machine and four 32 gig modules in the other. Popping them in and out is not exactly simple as they have their own cooling system so I think we'll just go with shoving the four modules in at once. I'm also not sure of the design, could be dual channel or something more exotic.

I'm not expecting to see much difference apart from a very large layout so benchmarking probably won't show much difference same as SSD versus hard drive have about the same FPS but things pop up faster with an SSD.

Cheerio John

 

[wreeder]

You can use the free utility CPU-Z to see whether your motherboard is dual channel or something else as well as lots of other useful info.

 

[JCitron]

Your RTX3080 will steal some of the system RAM for frame buffering. Having the extra RAM will help with that as well as creating and installing content from CDP files. CDP files hit both the CPU and the RAM pretty hard and I ran out of RAM on my old PC with 32 GB of RAM when I was installing content from a very large CDP file. When I got my new machine with 64 GB of RAM, that issue went away.

 

[johnwhelan]

Your RTX3080 will steal some of the system RAM for frame buffering. Having the extra RAM will help with that as well as creating and installing content from CDP files. CDP files hit both the CPU and the RAM pretty hard and I ran out of RAM on my old PC with 32 GB of RAM when I was installing content from a very large CDP file. When I got my new machine with 64 GB of RAM, that issue went away.

Ta

John

 

[martinvk]

Having gone from 16 to 64 GB and from a GTX 1070 TI to an RTX 4060 when I upgraded my Trainz computer, I can say that the existing routes all load much faster and seem to run much smoother. Don't have any numbers to back that up but that is how it feels.

 

[paulper]

Dual channel will definitely speed things up, regardless of whether you have 16, 32 or 64gb.

 

[johnwhelan]

Dual channel will definitely speed things up, regardless of whether you have 16, 32 or 64gb.

There are more exotic setups than dual channel on workstations and servers. This is at least dual channel but maybe something more exotic which is why I'll populate all four slots that are already populated.

Thanks John

 

[johnwhelan]

I've just looked it up, it is quad channel memory.

Cheerio John