RAM Utilization. How is it working for you?

I’ve always been a bit confused at how my system is allocating RAM to MSFS. My overall system RAM usage always seems to be just under 50%, and the RAM MSFS uses, according to Task Manager is just a small portion of the in-use RAM. It seems odd to me. So my question is, how is RAM being allocated on your system?

Here are my system specs, and below are several screenshots of my performance and system utilization.

Intel i5-13600K @ 5.4 GHz. 32 GB 3600 MT/s DDR4. AMD RX 6800XT

Flight setup - KMIA - KIAD. Live weather. Online Traffic Off. B747-8i AAU2 Beta version
Graphics settings: 3440x1440. TLOD / OLOD - 200 / 100. Other settings are a mix of mainly high and ultra.

Other info
FSLTL (IFR traffic = 30, Airborne radius = 75 km, Ground radius = 10 km, all static and VFR traffic is zero)
AIFlow and AI Ground
GAIST Ultra with US/Caribbean routes enabled
Volanta
Little NavMap
Chome with a few tabs open (i.e. Simbrief and my OFP, this lovely forum, DIscord)

My main question, why is MSFS only using 3.3 GB of RAM?

GamebarPerf

I went back and looked at several of my screen captures with relevant memory/performance data (see my PC specs in my profile). While I also have 32gig of memory, MSFS never went above ~7.1 gig of memory (14 gig total for all apps/processes). Note, I was not running all of the other apps in the background as you were - just FSLTL.

Perhaps this is a Xbox thing as to keep everything running within a max 16gig environment? :thinking: :man_shrugging:

It won’t use more system memory than it has data to work with just because more memory exists. That extra RAM will only get used for filesystem caching, background apps, etc.

Generally video RAM is much more precious and in demand in MSFS while if you have over 16 GB system RAM you’ll never run out in MSFS.

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It really seems like the extra RAM could be put to better use, either in caching server data or pre-loading in scenery. Oh well!

8GB of my 32 is dedicated to a ramdisk rolling cache … works really well especially when I’m thermalling in circles. Even over big PG cities my internet usage drops to near nothing so it’s a potential bottleneck I never have to worry about.

BTW think of ram as a fuel tank, size doesn’t really matter so long as there’s some gas in there and it’s not overflowing.

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