32GB vs 64GB RAM Experience

User Support Hub Install, Performance & Graphics
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I’ll repeat myself - you do you, and I’ll do me. I was quite clear that not everyone has the same needs, or runs the same software, so your rebuttal that “the starting assumption should be the average user” is irrelevant to my post.

Just who is “the average user” anyway? Stats say half are on xbox. I’ve seen the graphics on xbox, and compared to a performance PC, it’s a real step back.

And yes, “cheaper than staples” has been a thing for quite some time. I billion bits of ram is a lot cheaper than 1 billion staples. ISTR Scientific American making that observation a couple of decades ago, back in the megabit era.

So should we all settle for XBox levels of performance because half the users are stuck on XBox? Not gonna happen, because we are all different.

As for “original post”, here’s what the original poster said about more than 32 gb of RAM - it’s definitely a QoL improvement. I’ve got 128gb of RAM, and no stutters at KJFK from the marketplace. RAM makes a difference. And THAT is the topic of the original post, not anything you mentioned, which is unfortunately off-topic.

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did notice the sim to be much smoother. Now, I almost never experience any stutters, but I did on occasion get a few tiny stutters with the 32GB. I been on the 64GB for a few days now and have not noticed any stutters at all. Everything just seems smoother over all. My system is still using 15-20GB of RAM.

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By the same token, I could say your comment is equally irrelevant because your use case didn’t apply to the question of how much RAM is recommended for the sim. If the question was how much for the sim plus extras, then your use case would be relevant.

He said he got an improvement, but that goes back to the question I originally asked but was ignored on.

Without that info, it’s foolish to think the improvement was only related to RAM capacity and not RAM performance. It’s like the old megapixel wars in cameras, where all the manufacturers promote higher resolutions, which the masses gobble up, when actual image quality is about more than just the number of pixels in the image.

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Your question was rightfully ignored as it was off topic to the original post, which was that more RAM resulted in fewer, if any stutters. If you want increased overall performance, that’s CPU/GPU dependent, so again, both off topic and kind of obvious. More RAM won’t turn a potato into a rocketship.

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So if the OP went from slow 32 GB RAM to fast 64 GB RAM, you’re saying the only part of that equation is that matters is the capacity? Never mind that having faster performing RAM also improves the sim experience?

Because that’s what your logic is dictating by saying my questioning all the relevant variables as being irrelevant. I guess for my next upgrade I’ll just buy dirt cheap slow 64 GB RAM. Again, your logic here dictates I should see better performance than my current fast (for DDR4) 32 GB.

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A collossal waste of money. If you have at least 32 GB, you should never sacrifice RAM speed for capacity in MSFS. MSFS is notorious for being CPU bottlenecked, and faster RAM speed will significantly improve the 1% lows in such situations. You’ll feel those 1% lows.

Ironically, you’re probably hurting your 1% lows by running with 128 GB at a lower frequency. Why people always equate capacity with performance always blows my mind.

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I have 64 gB in my system, which is a Ryzen 5-3600 CPU (4 gHz, 6 cores, 12 threads) with a Radeon RX-6800-XT GPU. Running MSFS-2020, I have never been able to use Ultra graphics and still get 30 FPS, especially in the faster jet aircraft. On approach in to a landing at an airport in any big city where there’s dense scenery, in any of the airliners that have approach speeds of 135 knots or more, I can only run Medium, or sometimes High, but never Ultra. Looking at the system loads in Task Manager, the problem is obvious: the GPU is being pushed to 100% and can’t keep up with rendering the scenery at 135~150 knots. The CPU isn’t being stressed at all, it’s running at maybe 35% to 40%, and the sim is using no more than 30 of the 64 gB of DRAM. So I would say that in MSFS, the bottleneck causing poor frame rates, freeze-ups, and stutter, is almost always the GPU. 32 gB of DRAM and a 6 core CPU seems to be more than enough, but if you really want to use Ultra graphics on a 4K monitor, you will need the top of the line GPU, like the Radeon RX-7900-XTS.

That said, MSFS-2024 is still an unknown quantity. The scenery TIN model is 4,000 times denser than in 2020, and that’s likely going to strain system resources in many PC’s that have less than Top-of-the-line hardware. Another thing we don’t know yet, is this: In MSFS-2020, a Ryzen 5 was plenty good enough as the CPU, but the sim needed a top-of-the-line GPU. The sim didn’t seem to be capable of pushing some of the workload off of the GPU onto the CPU, often leaving the CPU idling along. Maybe MSFS 2024 is different? I can’t help but notice that the minimum CPU is now a Ryzen 7, 8 core CPU, with a Ryzen 9, 12 core CPU recommended. Does this mean that the CPU has been given more of the task of processing scenery data?
Here’s one more thing for upgraders to consider: To run MSFS-2024 in Ultra graphics mode - I assume all the advertising trailers were recorded in 4K Ultra - the Ryzen 9 CPU that’s called for in the specs needs to be equipped with a liquid cooled heat sink, and paired with the Radeon RX-7900-XT GPU, you will need at least an 850 watt power supply. Whatever computer you have been running MSFS-2020 on, very likely it will not have enough “mojo” to run 2024 in High or Ultra graphics quality mode. If you go to build a new system, you won’t be able to re-use your existing DRAM, which is probably DDR4. The new CPU’s all need DDR5 ram, so you will be buying a new mobo, a new CPU, and 64 gB of DDR5 is going to set you back another $200 on top of what the other hardware is going to cost. I looked up the parts on Amazon to build the “recommended” system to run MSFS-2024: $850 for a Ryzen 9 CPU and mobo, $200 for 64 gB of DRAM, $100 for an 850 watt power supply, $100 for a CPU cooler. $100 for a 2 tB SSD, and $280 for a 16 tB HDD (or re-use the one in your existing PC). With sales tax, the parts to build this system are going to come close to $2400.

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Careful using the task manager for this. The best way to check bottlenecks is to use the sim’s FPS display in the developers debug menu. Because the sim primarily hammers only one or two cores, it is very easy to be CPU limited even though the total utilization listed in the task manager may be low. The task manager only looks at utilization based on all cores, not individual cores.

In your case it may very well be a GPU limitation if that is showing 100%, but I would still check the FPS display to be sure before making any major changes.

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Yea, same here. I 100% agree. Plus more ram can actually SLOW you down if you’re not using it. Sure, you won’t be able to see it, but a benchmark can show it. It’s just more ram to address and deal with. I remember a while back seeing a benchmark between two sets of ram - I can’t recall if it was 16 and 32 or 32 and 64, but the game actually lost a couple FPS with the more ram. It was totally unnecessary for that game.

And it’s the same reason low end GPU’s sometimes come with a lot of ram - people think more ram is automatically better. As someone who used to sell computers, I couldn’t say how many times I heard “I need a 8 GB computer” or I need a 500 GB computer (referring to the HDD).

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64GB Master Race checking in.

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Our genomics server here at work has 3TB of ram - do I win :smiley:

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For GPU’s specifically it is. If you run out of VRAM one of two things tends to happen. Massive performance loss as things have to be unloaded from memory to allow other things in, or in the case of the X-Plane Vulkan betas the sim just fell over. IIRC those with 8GB cards using MSFS in DX12 mode had similar issues. Poor memory management.

More GPU memory avoids this. 24GB in my current one, never buying less than that from now on.

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@xxYUNIORxx
You previously had 32GB DDR5 6400 CL32 RAM. What was the exact model?

// edit
// Have you had 2x F5-6400J3239G16GX2-TZ5RK memory sticks until now?

What is the exact model of your current RAM sticks?

I saw that 1% performance test as well - it only lasted two minutes. It might not be enough time to draw solid conclusions about performance improvements.

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Meh if it needs it I’ll sell my 32GB in the package for about $30 less than I paid for it and put in 64. I think the big advantage would be to use the available ram for a ramdrive rolling cache, depending on how it’s actually implemented in the sim. Recently I have touched 27gb ram used in flight(single screen @4K).

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I read somewhere that Windows will use all the RAM that you have.
I don’t know if this is true but think it will use as much of what you have that it needs.

I run a 32 GB RAM Drive (64 GB DDR5) for Rolling Cache.
Seems that 32 GB of RAM is sufficient/plenty for FS2020.

I use ImDisk as my RamDrive. Works great.

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In the past couple weeks, I went to the '24 windows build preview and switched my texture resolution settng from ultra to high. I only used to use 14-16 or so GB of ram and now it’s around 25-27GB and a LOT smoother overall. I’ll have to turn back that texture resolution setting(set it back to ‘ultra’ at least) and check back. Really has been smooth sailing lately. Not sure if its the new windows build or that TR setting at ultra is a hog and bog setting. I first changed it as the textures were so heavy on the initial release of the C24 it was notable on a 4080s, but the game loads notably faster(like XBSX fast-only with 500GB of freeware attached) and everything stays snappy with no obnoxious LOD pop in now, buttery at 4K.

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Windows will commit most of it, but doesn’t mean it will use 100%. If that were the case, then MSFS would be using 100% of your RAM, which definitely isn’t the case. With 48 GB total RAM, I rarely see total physical memory usage go above 20 GB on MSFS.

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You won’t see MSFS itself eating up all your RAM, but MSFS reads and writes many files on disk, and any RAM that isn’t being used for applications or kernel ends up being used for disk cache.

Letting your entire MSFS rolling cache sit in disk cache in RAM probably reduces some of those infamous stutters from having to re-hit disk during scenery loads. :slight_smile:

[And you don’t have to set it up explicitly like a RAM disk, as it ‘just happens’ from the operating system’s functioning of the filesystem.]

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All modern operating systems use unused ram as an object cache (object in this case meaning sections of executable code, not things like sim objects). It will never show up in memory stats because it can be dumped at any time. It’s quicker because, instead of re-reading that code into RAM, you just change a pointer to point to it and update the memory map to show it as allocated.

The details of linux and bsd unix memory allocators are public; microsoft and apple, not so much. So look to the first two operating systems for theory on how it works.

One reason why there’s no such thing as “too much RAM”.

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I would clearly agree with that

… but as always, there are edge cases (e.g. embedded or mobile systems that run on battery, because RAM needs a constant refresh and that eats battery).

Overall this memory topic, from an engineering perspective, is really fascinating, because there are so many different aspects … and many (correct or incorrect) assumptions … and there is so much one can learn. From memory allocation algorithms, to the “Knuth” complexity of data search strategies (let me point to Btrees again), or the timing issues with a DDR bus, or corrupt firmware on RAM modules etc.

There are a number of claims that @barbra6456 made above where I would disagree (e.g. the Apple Darwin kernel is open source too, OS drive block caching usually also caches data … not only for executables or memory mapped files, etc.)

… but all in all, on a PC, I am with @barbra6456 and others:

  • More RAM is “always” good for you
  • … but that does not mean that every piece of software will benefit the same way

Personally, this little goose is really looking forward to some personal experiments with MSFS 2024 in order to see how well in handles my extra memory (which I just doubled … because I hope for the best :slight_smile: )

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Unlike some of the others, my Flight Sim machine is also a work computer and a workstation (when I run it on MacOS). But I can reboot it into Windows 11 Pro for Workstations (which runs on NVME storage).

I’ve gone to 96GB RAM from 48GB (swapped the RAM from another identical machine). I have a W6800X 32GB GPU and 28 core Xeon. No real difference between 48GB to 96GB.

What I get on my machine is very stable performance in 2D, never any stutters.

So I’m interested to see what 2024 will do.