Memory question

Does anyone know the amount of ram that Trainz maxes out at using....I have installed 16GB and want to know if I added another 16 if the program would benefit from 32 (DDR4) or if it stops being beneficial at 16..

Thanks,

RH001

You will be into diminishing returns. It will depend on the size of the layout and how many assets are involved. If you use perfmon you can get a very good idea of how much memory is currently being used. It's a Microsoft tool that comes with the operating system. Realistically I wouldn't expect much improvement above 8 gigs and it could well be 6. TANE is 64 bits so it doesn't max out at some magic number.

Win 10 will buffer your hard drives with extra memory but the performance gains will not be large so yes 128 gigs of memory will perform better than 64 gigs in absolute terms but you might be looking at .0002% improvement. Wins 10 home maxs at 128 gigs by the way pro 2 TG.

Cheerio John

Interesting question since I've been wondering about that all week. I have 16 GB and between TANE SP2 (beta) and all the other stuff running, I've been getting 80% memory (RAM) usage. But that was with a very large route (Ffestiniog).

A session for that particular route uses between 3.6 to 4GB of RAM and, with not much else running, uses up around 50% of my available memory. So that's OK providing I don't have much else running.

There are programs, such as Chrome, that can also chew a lot of memory so you need to either close them down or, in Chrome's case, reduce the number of tabs open. Or, buy more memory.

I only have DDR3 memory so it's reasonably cheap. Once you get to max memory in use, then Windows will start swapping stuff out to disk and that wouldn't be good for Trainz performance.

I'm running SP1 with everything maxed out and using 26.0% of 16GB DDR4 memory which includes Windows 10 64bit. In the past 3 hours it's peaked at 30.1%. However I wouldn't really expect anything different as Trainz is graphic hungry and it's my graphic card which is doing most of the work. Unless you are using on-board graphics where you can allocate masses of system memory to video which is seldom the case; I think as others have suggested more system memory would provide minimal performance return for and given expenditure. Peter

I did have 64GB installed in my current system. I have a bad DIMM which had me reduce the memory to 32GB in order to keep the pairs consistent, however, even this extra memory does help. The modern 64-bit operating systems are "smart" and make use of the extra RAM on board unlike the old 32-bit OS which wouldn't see anymore than 4GB anyway even if more was installed.

With the extra memory installed, more than one application can run without the programs constantly fighting for space, which means I can have T:ANE, TransDEM, Google Earth Application, and a browser open at the same time. The video card, even with its 11.5 GB of onboard DRAM, still makes use of system RAM, so having the extra RAM in the system doesn't hurt.

There are a couple of programs available from Microsoft's TechNet, which help us see the resources. Look for RAMMAP and Process Explorer.

The maximum physical system RAM utilisation I've ever seen (in T:ANE) was just recently in a simple test session in 'Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland 2014 TANE' which I created in SP2 beta build 88125, where my monitoring software (Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) indicated close to 12Gb of RAM being used. At the same time, the maximum amount of VRAM (of the total available 8Gb of GDDR5) being used was only 3Gb.
System Commit RAM (which includes virtual memory allocation) would have been well over 16Gb at the same time.
Since then I have run the same session again and it has used a maximum of only 9.6Gb using the exact same location and input variables in the latest beta build (88214).
I concluded that the high reading in the earlier build was probably an anomaly generated by some of the weird scripting issues we experienced in testing that build and which have now been fixed by an upgrade of their Visual Studio compiler and Standard Library.
Bottom line is, unless you have other more demanding RAM-hungry programs on your current rig - and you're a tiger for multitasking a large number of applications concurrently whilst playing Trainz - then there's little incentive or economic benefit at present for throwing an additional 16Gb of RAM at T:ANE.
It probably won't use it. The additional headroom (of 32Gb or more RAM) may allow you to run a RAMDISK or two to speed up certain applications/ processes, but you will largely see rapidly diminishing returns in performance and utilisation after 16Gb at the moment.

Thanks for all the responses..so I will stick with the 16GB then........I have a decent processor (I7 7700) and gpu (GTX-1060 6gb) and have seen good steady fps rate. Since I am running win10 that was why I was asking about the additional memory boost. Thanks again.

RH001

I noticed when editing a large layout (with many different kinds of scenery) that more internal memory does really help. I have tried playing T:ANE with either 8 and 16GB of memory. The difference is very noticeable. However, I think you won't notice anything beyond 24GB or higher.

I think the most I have seen it use is 9.1GB, but that was not on the largest map.