The two I tested were Rise of Flight and DCS Blackshark. I've read the latest Grand Theft Auto IV game also shows some improvement but I don't own that one to test with.

My biggest reason going this route though is for Adobe CS, and for when my graphics card memory runs out and spills over to physical RAM and then to the swap file... Right now I'm only running 4GB at home, I hope to go up to 12GB or 16GB by tax return season.

I don't have those two to test with specifically, but I strongly suspect a case of either placebo, or "correlation doesn't equal causation".

I do, however, have GTA4 to test. I fired it up and spent about 20 minutes running around while watching pagefile activity via Process Monitor. There isn't any. At all. Perhaps a half dozen reads from other processes when the game started, and another half dozen when it shut down.

Hi, I have MSI Afterburner which can Monitor the RAM used by the Vid card ingame.. Is there such a Program for Memory usage and display ingame real time??

I have seen Arma2:OA Go as high as 1260mb ingame..pushing the boundries of my 1280mb card!! hehe

More than 4 GB is not necessary for sims or games right now. But I know of two sim developers who are considering making 6 GB the recommended RAM for their new products. No, I can't say who. Maybe they'll decide 4 GB is enough.

If you're building a new computer, go with 6 or 8 depending on the mobo config. As others have said, with the current price of RAM, why not.

If you do PhotoShop (or any other big image editing program), video editing, or 3D image creation (3D Max), you can't have enough RAM.

Very interesting tests folks. Thanks for sharing the results.



Sure, MSI Afterburner can do that. If you open the settings and go to the monitoring tab, you can select what graphs you want to see. Once you check the one you want to turn it on (in this case memory usage), select it in the scroll list and check the box below that says "Show in OSD". You can check this box for each graph. Then you turn the OSD on with the included RivaTuner server app.

I'm also experimenting with some ARMA2 vram usage settings. Some have claimed increasing the system memory to 8GB from the typical 4GB helps a ton. In this case, I'd say this could possibly be true since ARMA 2 is an insatiable resource hog (as you pointed out) and W7 can borrow system memory for use by the graphics system as I understand it.

@ Phoenix, I thought the Ram MSI AB Monitored was the vRAM not the system memory?? I would like to monitor the System memory ingame..

Process Explorer or the Win7 Resource Monitor both will.



Yes. If you look at the system details you'll see figures for dedicated graphics memory and shared system memory under the graphics section. For me it's 2048 MB dedicated, 3067 MB shared. It's one of those things though that you want to avoid when possible. Transfers from system memory to GPU memory are much faster than say, accessing a page file on the hard drive, but it's still significantly slower than simply keeping everything in GPU memory.

Please remember that a 32Bit programme on a 64Bit OS will still be limited to allocating a maximum of 2GB for itself on the system memory.

I've no idea how much a 64Bit exe could address in theory, but remember that a 48Bit address space would be 256 TerraByte (85 times the size of the available 3TB HD's). So Win7 Home Premium users could run 64Bit programmes that could fill their 16GB memory limit and Win7 Professional users could in theory fill the 192GB memory limit.

Now how large an area would be possibly be populated and textured in FSX, if all texture and models would reside in 190GB memory (and have no disk access stutter)?

Process Explorer or the Win7 Resource Monitor both will.


Hi, I want the Amount of System RAM used to be Displayed inGame.. I do NOT see such and option on Resource monitor.. I do NOT want to run the game then ALT Tab out to see resource monitor??

I don't know off hand of anything capable of that.



Unless it was linked with the largeaddressaware flag, then it can address a full 4GB.



2^64 bytes, which is 16 EB (exabytes) or 17,179,869,184 GB.

Off the top of my head, Arma II. And most simulators that have big scenes. Of course, both of the big civilian ones can't be loaded in a ram drive due to the sheer volume of data they have.

Apologies dude, wasn't reading carefully enough. I don't know of anything that will do that, but maybe you could run ARMA in windowed mode so you can keep the resource monitor visible - but that might change your results some =/

Excuse me if I don't take that as being the truth, but just the theoretical limit. As the memory limit in Windows7 (professional and higher) is 192GB, the memory limit for an exe running under it will either be 192GB or lower.

That is the limit determined by hardware. What the OS does is its own business. If I want to I can write a 64 bit OS where executables are limited to 1 MB of memory. The current limit on Windows 7 x64 is 8 TB IIRC.

This has now been said a few times in this thread, to clarify: Unless you run specific 64bit software for those tasks, will more RAM even help? For example the Photoshop "Lite" many people get with their cameras and use are 32bit apps limited to max 2GB, maybe 3GB RAM. You'd need professional products (with prices to match)... to see a difference no?

Short answer: Maybe (probably).

Long answer: It depends on exactly how Adobe set up Photoshop Lite. If they didn't set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag when creating the exe, then it's flat-out limited addressing only 2GB memory. If they did set the flag, then even if the exe is 32 bit it could address up to 4GB of memory under win64. Assuming, that is, that the "lite" version uses allocators and algorithms that are able to take advantage of >2GB of memory. I'd say that it probably does, since I doubt it's worth the effort for Adobe to make such a significant change.

I thought LAA flag meant max. 3GB for the application, 2GB without LAA?

By this reasoning I always held that if basic system processes fit inside 1GB (easy in Win7), you are well off with 4GB as long as you are not running specialized 64bit applications. Though a 64bit OS still makes sense to avoid the "management limits" if you also have large VRAM.

If LAA means 4GB max, then 6GB systems would make more sense for more people.

Under 32 bit windows (any version), yes. 2GB for any process, 2GB for the kernel. If you boot with the /3GB switch in boot.ini (you shouldn't) then a process with LAA can address up to 3GB, but the kernel is limited to 1GB.

Under 64 bit windows, a process without LAA is limited to 2GB, same as 32 bit. A process with LAA however can address the full 4GB of the 32 bit address space.



Honestly I would expect that any program with real need to address >2GB of memory would (should) have a 64 bit version. Just flipping on LAA doesn't do much. The program has to be design to actually allocate and use the extra memory to see a real benefit from it.

Take Oblivion for example. With all the hi-res texture packs and so on available for it it's pretty easy to run into problems with the game running out of memory and crashing when it hits the 2GB barrier. You can modify the game's exe to enable the LAA flag, and doing so will save you from some of the crashes. However, the game will never really use more than 2GB, because it wasn't built to make use of more memory.

Hi, I had added a Memory stick for some added RAM w/Readyboost feature. Is there anywhere I can see the added RAM?? I went into system and it does NOT show the extra 2 gb??

Was just doing an experiment for now will probally add some Real memory ltr..

I recently went from 4GB>8GB on Win7 64bit and can't say I noticed much benefit. I'm sure I am getting some benefit, just can't say it is all that noticeable so I wouldn't sweat it if money is tight.

Also, read the below article. It quite clearly states that unless a game is 64bit native it can't see anymore than 2GB of ram available to it. That explains why I see little benefit by going to 8GB of ram because in just about all games it makes no dif if you have 4GB or 8GB, it will still only be able to use 2GB max.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/405282