Hello all, so i have 64GB of ram. When i check my RAM usage its only showing 8gb when in game.
I mainly fly in VR , is there any specific settings i could raise that would use more ram for some extra performance ? It seems a waste to have so much RAM that isnt being used by the game or my pc.
Thanks
Game can use >25 Gb easily. Just load a very detailed city with several airports and AI traffic nearby, like New York, and use a high terrain viewdistance. You will see how RAM is increasing very fast.
You can also change the game process CPU priority to high in the task manager and that will also allocate more RAM to it.
Cheers
Brilliant will give it a try , thanks for the reply .
Is there something specific that says more RAM for MSFS is better performance? It is if your RAM is too small. MSFS can run on systems as small as 8 Gb but probably not perform very well. Your extra RAM is useful to run at the same time MSFS, VR, Chrome, Netflix, and Photoshop. Windows does an excellent job of allocating memory as programs need it.
I’ve just posted this in another topic about freezes but I can’t see why it shouldn’t help here also.
“Another thing to try is using a dedicated fixed size virtual memory cache on an SSD not used by MSFS and disabling the VM on drives that are used by it. 10GB works fine for me”
Can you give an example or a screenshot of how you have that set up? I have MSFS in my D: drive away from the C:, although right now my D: drive is system managed and I have my C: set to tweaked values I found on a YT video.
Sure thing. Although I probably shouldn’t mine’s actually on a partition on my E drive but with 32GB of CL14@3333MHz and 12GB of vram it gets used little so I’m not worried about wearing the SSD disproportionately. PS I should really change the name of D: to MSFS, I actually do all my recording to the faster C: drive
So you have your drive with MSFS allocated at 10GB and everything else set to no page size so that it can ebb and flow as needed? Am I understanding that correctly? From the stuff I read having things set to system managed is not ideal performance wise. How have you noticed your performance by dedicating your MSFS drive with RAM but leaving everything else off?
Tbh I never stutter or have performance problems anyway, I just think it a better set up.
Sorry I’ve just re-read your post and no, MSFS is actually installed on C: but the packages and only the packages are on D: (500GB NVMe) … you can’t see it here but I have very few addons.
Thanks for the prompt feed back. Will make some changes and see how that fares.
So if MSFS is on D: drive, what do you have V: set at 10 for?
As mentioned above I set it on a 10GB partition on my E: drive although that’s not actually necessary on SSD … habit I guess.
Changing the CPU priority has NOTHING to do with RAM. Windows automatically gives processes RAM they need up to a point. If there is no RAM available, Windows will move portions of RAM to virtual disk. This is NOT good for MSFS and performance will decrease significantly if Windows uses the virtual disk.
Windows scheduler automatically assigns processes to cores. Because MSFS processes a lot of files, it has to wait for file I/O to complete. Increasing priority for a process doesn’t decrease the file I/O wait times. When the MSFS thread waiting for a file, Windows will dispatch a process that is waiting to run. A multi-core underutilized CPU probably doesn’t have too many processes waiting for a CPU which makes priority changes practically meaningless.
It is not a good idea to change a process priority unless you are familiar with the Windows scheduler.
The physical ram you have beyond what the sim uses is still helping you. That 8 GB is only what the program needs to be able to run. IE, if you were to overwrite that data the program would cease to function. Some things like, for example the tire smoke FX that was last seen on an AI aircraft landing as you departed 4 hours ago on your long-haul flight isn’t really “critical” anymore, the sim lets go of it, but that data is not removed from the ram, not yet anyway. This can be seen as the “standby” part of memory composition graph in task manager. Now if you land, the aforementioned smoke FX doesn’t need to be pulled from the slow storage if it’s still cached in the ram from the last time you saw it hours ago. If physical memory becomes scarce, like if you only had 12GB of ram and were using 10, the smoke FX wouldn’t be able to stay there for very long, get replaced by something else and you would have to pull it from storage again. Ideally, you want zero truly free space in your memory. It’s better performance wise to have whatever is not currently required memory space for the running applications to be filled with old data that might be needed again later. Since it can be overwritten if some other program needs to use the space, it’s functionally the same as truly free space, but still offers a potential performance benefit if the cached data is used again.
Try having a look at the size of the standby portion of the graph after flying for a long time. I bet its absolutely massive.
Changing priority just makes game process run with higher priority than the other processes which are set to run normal. There´s no risk at all. It will just make game use CPU first than other apps which are also waiting to use it too, but they will use it as well afterwards.
The virtual memory issue performance degradation effect that you say happens under normal conditions if you load a heavy city for instance and is indeed caused by high VRAM usage not by high RAM usage because I also see it when having 64GB onboard and pagefile disabled. This is highly expected to happen indeed as far as we saw during SU10 beta testing because game is not releasing VRAM as frequently as it should. Game can use more than 25GB RAM in very particular situations (in New York with high detais) but normally will just use around 10GB. However is going to use more than 8GB VRAM most of the time even at regular areas with not so much details.
Cheers
If a multi-cpu processor has low utilization, priority isn’t going to make too much of a difference. But messing with Windows scheduler is never recommended.
I think you are mixing up RAM and VRAM. Virtual memory for RAM should be configured on all systems. The virtual memory performance degradation for MSFS happens when Windows starts moving parts of MSFS memory in RAM to virtual page disk. This happens when RAM is filling up. This has nothing to do with VRAM.
I wouldn’t be so sure, virtual memory has an address that’s probably much easier to code in.
No, I’m not mixing anything. The performance issue in game is happening when VRAM is filling up, not when RAM is filling up. That was already documented in several posts during SU10 beta testing.
Cheers
If VRAM filling up is causing system performance problems with the CPU and RAM, I hope this was escalated to Microsoft and/or NVIDIA. This is a huge problem especially with smaller systems, probably something broken with Windows memory manager. MSFS is supposed to be able to run on small 8 Gb systems.
