is it worth upgrading to 32 gigs of ram for star citizen let's see
a page file is an area on the hard disk that windows uses as if it were ram
hard faults occur when a memory block has to swap to a page file instead of physical memory
okay so normally when you have discussions around this 32 gigs versus 16 lots of people will say oh
yeah it's definitely better on the 32 system it's smoother some people even say there's an fps gain
and i'm not actually interested in that today i don't really think it's possible to really compare
fps in a particularly scientific way or fair way on the servers in star citizen as they are
so we're just not going to bother with that but we are going to look at what might be causing
uh more smoothness potentially on the 32 gig system so on the left the 32 on the right
16 and basically keep your eye on that graph at the bottom the hard fault the second graph
now basically on the 32 gig system there are no hard drives that the memory is not being swapped
between the page file and uh the main system round whereas on the 16 gig system it's happening all
the time um and as you can see in the other two graphs the physical memory is just is just maxed
out basically on the uh 16 gig system so startism will use all 16gb and then it will have to go to
the page file because it's got no more space in the actual physical run and that basically is is
what's the only real difference uh between the two the 32 gig system is completely uh un bottlenecked
in terms of actual physical memory uh and therefore it doesn't have to keep swapping back
and forth between ram and page file and that is the crucial difference i would say my experience
having tested this and played around with it again you can't say for sure but it feels smoother but
looking at the actual uh graph there you can see that it is not having to work uh as hard in terms
of going to the page file and page file is much slower so that's on your ssd uh or your if you've
got a hard drive on your hard drive even slower it the speed at which that can transfer data is just
nowhere near the speed that uh your ram uh can uh and here we've got just a screenshot quickly of
the the maximum just in a very short test just on laurel that i saw of the the total system usage of
ram so we are using and that's actual physical ram uh real ram it's using nearly 19 gigs of ram so
the short of this is and i really want to keep quite short is that basically started
in its current development at this point will use more than 16 gigs of ram uh and it will
it makes sense that it feels smoother because it isn't having to go to the page file anywhere
near as much there is a little bit occasionally but yes it is basically you have taken page file
out of the equation generally and that does lead to i think smoother gameplay again whether this
will change as the development goes on whether the ram quotes will go down 16 gigs is kind of
is accepted as a sweet spot for gaming uh but i asked are cig really going to whack a 32 gig
minimum requirement on the game i doubt it depends on how long it takes to actually come out maybe
but um i would have thought they will try and keep brand new down but then the game is going to be
crazy and it is a big tech kind of experiment in lots of ways so who knows maybe they'll just keep
uh increasing requirements it is just completely unoptimized at this point in terms of ram so
you can't say you have to have 32 gigs to run the game runs it runs but it's just a bit more jittery
uh with 16 gig um ram though is coming down in price so i've seen quite a few deals popping up
now where 32 gig is dropping it's not a bad time if you've got if you've basically got
nothing else in your system that you need to upgrade and you've got a bit of money
yeah you you could upgrade 32 gig and i probably would say i've it's worth it and obviously if
you're doing other things that aren't just gaming video editing and all sorts of other things there
are uses actually for more ram uh but to conclude in star citizen there is an actual difference
the your system is doing something differently when you put those two because of ram in it uh
uh it's really down to you whether you think that is worth upgrading for if you like this
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