Effect of RAM on performance in Star Citizen?

[GarlanTyrell]

Does anyone have experience with how much the amount of system RAM effects the performance of Star citizen?

My with my current system specs are i7 4770K @ 4.2 GHz, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, GTX 1070Ti, driving a 2560x1080 monitor.

Playing arena commander or walking around the hanger, I was getting 60fps on max settings no problem. But in the PU it's in the low to mid 20's sometimes as high as 30 but can dip to 15.
Has anyone tried different amounts of RAM in the same system and compared the effect, as I have no idea if the performance is the game's fault or my system running out of memory...

8GB has (nearly) always been enough as long as when I play games I don't keep multiple window's worth of tabs open. And I've wanted to get another 8GB for the past year but prices have been so crazy (its twice as expensive as when I bought it in the first place). I was hoping to hold off for another couple of years till my next CPU upgrade, as that would mean switching to DDR4, I didn't want to waste the money on a little extra DDR3 unless I was sure that was going to make SC run better.

[chiller15]

Have you checked how much RAM is being used by your system when these dips in performance occur in Task Manager?

[Murasaki]

The game is just unoptimized, servers are at fault for the low fps. I've recently upgraded from 8 to 16gigs and it made no difference. I'm lucky to get 30fps. 60 only when people get kicked off because there's an update

[GarlanTyrell]

5 minutes ago, chiller15 said:

Have you checked how much RAM is being used by your system when these dips in performance occur in Task Manager?

From memory, it was mid-90's but not quite 100%

But this was from like 2 months ago when it first came out, I haven't been able to play since as between the low fps and the horrendous fish-eye effect on ultra-wide screens, it kept making me feel sick, but I'm counting on the FOV issue being fixed in 3.1 in a couple of weeks.

[chiller15]

1 hour ago, GarlanTyrell said:

From memory, it was mid-90's but not quite 100%

But this was from like 2 months ago when it first came out, I haven't been able to play since as between the low fps and the horrendous fish-eye effect on ultra-wide screens, it kept making me feel sick, but I'm counting on the FOV issue being fixed in 3.1 in a couple of weeks.

If you're up that high, I'd recommending getting more RAM, possibly going up to 16GB. The problem with high RAM usage is that you end up using swap memory, which is awful performance wise.

[rentaspoon]

On 16/03/2018 at 9:50 AM, GarlanTyrell said:

Does anyone have experience with how much the amount of system RAM effects the performance of Star citizen?

My with my current system specs are i7 4770K @ 4.2 GHz, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, GTX 1070Ti, driving a 2560x1080 monitor.

Playing arena commander or walking around the hanger, I was getting 60fps on max settings no problem. But in the PU it's in the low to mid 20's sometimes as high as 30 but can dip to 15.
Has anyone tried different amounts of RAM in the same system and compared the effect, as I have no idea if the performance is the game's fault or my system running out of memory...

8GB has (nearly) always been enough as long as when I play games I don't keep multiple window's worth of tabs open. And I've wanted to get another 8GB for the past year but prices have been so crazy (its twice as expensive as when I bought it in the first place). I was hoping to hold off for another couple of years till my next CPU upgrade, as that would mean switching to DDR4, I didn't want to waste the money on a little extra DDR3 unless I was sure that was going to make SC run better.

I wouldn't waste the money, I was troubleshooting yesterday and took a stick of ram out to see if that was the fault, I found it to be extra jittery in port olisar but apart from that it ran fairly smooth after a while, manage to get 60fps in places. 8gb is ok, 16gb seems to just smooth the gameplay a little.

 

The PU is taxing on the server at the moment so the jankiness is because of that, optimization on the backend happens constantly and you can notice the difference if you play throughout patches.

 

Recent AtV below explains whats happening.

 

 

[GarlanTyrell]

On 3/16/2018 at 9:52 AM, chiller15 said:

Have you checked how much RAM is being used by your system when these dips in performance occur in Task Manager?

Yup, I was right, its not quite at 100% but mid 90's.

I guess I'll wait to see how 3.1 turn out, and see if that improves the frame rate situation sufficiently on its own.
It would also be interesting to see if the instability issues have will be fixed or if not if they are my install/hardware issues.

[Toysrme]

First, at no point has Star Citizen wanted less than 16gb of system ram. If you can pick up a cheap doubling to 16, do so.
Unlike what a certain someone claimed, ram speed does not make a big difference in how SC runs (That person was wildly varying the frequency without ever adjusting the timings... Yes... DDR4-2133 *IS* very slow... With a CL19 timing )
Only extremely early in the DFM (May/June 2014) would it run acceptably with minimal page file swapping on even 12gb. So yes, you want 16gb+. 24gb+ frequently comes in handy as roughly every other ETF/PTU cycle the game will want to consume more than 16gb. (Tho not as much #"memory leak" as people think, simply the game wanting to use more than 16gb. Generally it stabilizes at 17-19gb which people misattribute as "leaking".)

Second, you're actually somewhat short on CPU power. Everything that comes before Kabylake & Coffeelake (include heavily overclocked Skylake) struggles to run the game.
Depending on what is happening there is 2-3x more performance on a 7700, 8600 or 8700k @ 5.2ghz than Haswell @ 4.5ghz, Broadwell @ 4.3ghz, Sandy Bridge @ 5ghz or Ryzen @ 4ghz will achieve (Those are all around the same average speed in general, tho Sandy Bridge has much worse frame pacing when issues arise). There's that big of a gap in IPC and clock rates.
Star Citizen's frame rate is heavily CPU bound, and despite myths from idiots, vehicles cause most of that. SC's frame rate will increase at a 1:1 ratio with CPU frequency. Overclocking helps and some 4790k's can be great overclockers, but at the end of the day an 8700k overclocked is twice as fast anytime a lot of ships have spawned. (So no, 3.1 will not improve this. Only the actual "lack of players spawning ships and causing the AI to spawn ships" has increased the frame rate over time.)

A good example, a stock i7-5960x vs an i7-7700k @ 5.1ghz. Both sitting side by side in the same ship in the PU. Both identical system specs (32gb ddr4-3000, SLI 1080Ti, seperate OS/Game SSD installs). The 7700k had double the frame rate (24fps vs 12), for reference a 5ghz fx-8350 with 16gb ddr3-2400 and a gtx-980 on an SSD had 5-7fps. LoL!



Grab another 8gb on the cheap off ebay.

I hope that helps, but the honest answer is your 4790k isn't "slow" in games until it meets heavy tasks. Examples of where it falls flat on it's four year old face would be:
Star Citizen with ships spawned (obviously)
Witcher 3 anywhere remotely close to a populated area

GTA-V
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Anything else that you want extremely high FPS on (You'd need a second 1080Ti for that pursuit)

That's when the newer flagships from the last year show they're 20-30% faster than the best that came before them, 40% in some clear cases.

[JayRad]

Star Citizen was using almost 11GB of 16GB on my system. Everything was maxed and at 1440p.

[Daymin]

I have 32GB of RAM and Star citizen uses (as of the r_displayinfo 3 command ingame) 14GB at maximum.
The Dips are mostly sever side or if an unpredictable event happens (like crashing my Cutlass into a station).

I've played it from 1080p up to 4k the fps does not really change a lot.

[Sealance]

SC eats about 20 gigs of ram out of my 24gb

[Underwrought]

On 8/1/2018 at 9:15 AM, Sealance said:

SC eats about 20 gigs of ram out of my 24gb

Yeah thats a memory leak issue in the game code.  Not surprising given how much of a mess the project has been and still is.

[GarlanTyrell]

Well I recently doubled my RAM to 16GB and got an extra 5-10fps in port Olisar, so it seems to have solved my performance issue for now.

[Kade7596]

I run Star Citizen using the following hardware:

• Z77 chipset
• i5-3570K @ 4.5 GHz
• 16 GB DDR3-2400 @ CL10
• GTX 1070 @ 2050 MHz
• SC installed on a SATA III SSD
• ...on a 2560x1080 @ 144 Hz display

In 'the persistent universe' ('Crusader'), I get whatever the current server-limited maximum is that other players are able to achieve; usually up to 40-45 FPS on a full server, but as high as offline mode performance when there are very few people and there is very little activity on the server.

 

In 'offline modes' such as in a hangar or in smaller online areas such as in Arena Commander matches, I get frame rates ranging from 90-110~ at "Very High" -- but as previously stated, the current graphics settings have very little in-game effect either on visuals or performance. The biggest changes you can make are to turn off SSDO and motion blur.

 

You may want to add RAM... but considering the current state of the game, wait for "object container streaming" and "bind culling" to be fully implemented in 3.3 and/or 3.4. These two engine optimization features may drastically improve performance on systems with less than 16 GB.

 

If you do want to upgrade, you're not wrong to want to wait until you upgrade to an entirely new platform. DDR5 is actually not far off, either, by the way... and while that's said to be a capacity boost moreso than a performance boost, it should reduce the price of any still-available DDR4 RAM modules until supply becomes limited... which often artificially inflates prices.

[Sealance]

After going from 24 to 36gb ram I did notice an increase in framerate to a point where it's pretty much over 20fps most of the time