I’m very impressed with VR performance after the latest patch, I feel through more optimizations they can squeeze out even more of my 1080ti/8700K combo and yes going from 16GB to 32GB helped my performance a ton.
my 8 GB VRAM get used ~ 80% when MSFS runs, my 32 GB RAM I am testing now however are only used ~42%. Haven’t see it go beyong that since I started looking at the data. (which was only recently). The game always maxes out my RX580 operformance but that’s about it.
I started testing this after the recent WU 4. I heard the game was more RAM hungry in the past, but maybe they are in the process of optimising it. I have not looked at RAM consumption before WU 4.
I have the 32GB RAM only to test it and decided to keep my 16 GB that I own and not upgrade it. If the game doesn’t use more RAM when I play it, why upgrade. Getting the 32 Gb of RAm did not help at all with the FPS for me and also the stutters the game sometimes has were unaffected and must have different causes than not enough RAM.
btw, the FPS btw stay the same if I run the RAM @3200 Mhz or @2200 Mhz. The game doesn’t seem to demand a high RAM speed.
I do Bushtrips only (with smaller aircrafts) and rarley visit city areas, not sure if that makes a difference. I usually do not play in multiplayer and don’t use AI traffic or such. I play almost vanilla, no scenery mods, just a couple freeware planes. I am not using VR.
I had 16GB at launch, had to use the swap file for the sim not to run out of memory and crash in certain places like NYC. According to dev blogs and all that stuff, they’ve been improving the memory usage ever since. Just a thing to keep in mind.
I have 32GB ram myself but I can happily browse the internet and run SimToolKitPro while the game is running. I did a 12hr flight yesterday and it ran just fine
16GB is OK, 32GB is safe. It depends on the resolution and settings you are using.
I play on 3440x1440 and ULTRA, when flying small planes, High with Airliners.
I get up to 80% usage of my 32GB RAM.
Typically my system sits with about 8Gb RAM in use “idle” - such as now with Chrome and Outlook open. When I run the sim I will typically also be running Little Nav Map, sometimes Excel (my log book), Chrome, Explorer (screenshots), sometimes Navigraph and FlightControlReplay.
Normally, cruising in countryside, total RAM usage will be c. 20Gb. However, if I increase the sim rate to max for a longish period, I can get that usage up north of 30Gb (that’s total). At that point the sim starts to get into single digit FPS - but while on max sim rate. If I slow the sim rate back down, that FPS increases back to my normal 45-50, even with 30Gb RAM usage. I does gradually release that RAM over time - but it can take quite a while - many minutes.
I’ve just upgraded my system to an i7-11700K, 64GB DDR4 3200, and a 3090, and, after taking a very deep breath, am glad I did. Expensive, but WOW! I’m running MSFS in 4K, with all sliders maxed out. It’s breath-taking.
I see the new xbox has 16GB GDDR6/320-bit (10GB at 560GB/Sec, 6GB at 336GB/Sec), I think I read that is runs differently to pc ram in terms of architecture. So surely, they will optimise it to fit xbox requirements and to 16gb?
What is amusing is you,ignoring that RAM is withdrawn from an app as much as there is there to have and the fact that you bought a 2500$ gpu that is a hoax which means it’s not for gaming but for developing
I checked this yesterday for other reasons in my test flight KPDX - KSEA in the 787 what is representative imho.
I am surprized that both RAM/VRAM use stay relative low at around 12GB/8GB of 32GB/11GB.
Resolution is 3440x1440 resp. Reverb G2 at 100% RS in VR. Settings are medium - ultra in 2D for about 50fps and medium- high for 30fps in VR.
I remember to have had more RAM use in the past. Maybe a side effect off the “optimizations” done for the xbox port?
By accident I found that MSFS use AVX extensions what is important because most bios/oc settings have an AVX offset. Please note that when you run MSFS and wondering where your cpu power is gone I was’nt aware that my system runs at only 4.6Ghz under MSFS since a while for that I have had an -3 AVX offset in my settings.
I was wondering about this myself. I have a 3090 and 32 GB ram and have been thinking about upgrading to 64GB but I’ve seen lots of videos on Youtube where allocation doesn’t equal usage.
The more ram you have the more your system will allocate to a game, but that is not actual ram usage, just allocation?
If you know VR Flight Sim Guy’s channel on Youtube. He has the same PC build as me apart from he has only 16GB of ram versus my 32GB. From watching his videos I don’t get any improvement in performace at all, at least not what I can see with my own eyes. Often, his videos seem to have smoother performance than I do…
No. The game will take as much RAM/VRAM as it needs based on the settings you choose. Windows will do a lot of swapping and memory management behind the scenes if you are on the borderline. I have 11GB of VRAM in my 1080ti, and if the game requests more Windows will swap Dedicated VRAM for Shared VRAM. This shows up as Copy activity in the Task Manager performance window for your GPU. You typically do not want that swapping to occur because now you are working across different memory buses and different memory speeds. As well, the programmer is responsible for keeping track of what has been swapped, so this can be an area where stutters occur.
That’s interesting I didn’t know ram could be shared, so it’s mostly VRAM that’s important, in the first place then? In my case, with a 3090 would I get any benefit from going to 64Gb from 32GB or would not be needed as I have enough VRAM?
32Gb and a decent psu. I have 64Gb and a HX1200i psu and I have not had CTD’s like some folk that I have been reading about. To me the power of the PSU is very important, 16 and 32 Gb of RAM is good as long as it is quality RAM.
I did try LFPG, I set everything to superultramax (in 4k) in a 787 and took off to fly over Paris with photogrammetry on.
I was surprised it was actually slightly LOWER memory usage than where I fly normally. It hovered around 20GB of RAM (maybe maxing around 22-23GB), and about 11-12GB of VRAM consistently.
Like I say, I’ve seen higher usage in seemingly simpler environments. I wonder if it’s to do with manual and/or rolling cache. I can imagine where I usually fly, everything is already in the rolling cache, so upon loading it up, it just streams all that data from the cache file on disk, into the RAM/VRAM.
Depends on what you consider a need. Running the sim well is one thing, but what about reducing your page file (and thus prolonging the write-life of your disk?)
Memory allocation and memory usage are two different things, just because a software will allocate X amount of memory, doesn’t mean it will work with less.
You often see this kind of misconception, “How is 8gb VRAM enough when software X is already using most of it?”.
What is relevant is the usage and how it affects performance, even if it would actually use 24gb RAM, the effect on performance compared to 16gb might be very small, it depends on a lot of factors.
I was’nt aware that my system runs at only 4.6Ghz under MSFS since a while for that I have had an -3 AVX offset in my settings.