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What is the correlation between ram and game performance?
Saunta2
Posts: 870 Member
Hi all. Basically I want to know how ram affects the game especially large lots and also if the amount of cc in your folder matters.
Another game I play has increased ram usage for added assets in each dlc plus downloaded assets and mods. I have a gaming laptop with 8gb ram however I find large, heavily decorated lots lag a bit even if they're 100% vanilla, and take several seconds to unpause coming out of build mode.
My mods folder is currently 15gb due to only having a 256gb ssd, my back up folder I want to put back in after upgrading my storage is 65gb. Before my desktop stopped working, 11.8 of my 12gb were in use when playing with my 50gb mods folder in. It dropped to about 9gb after removing the mods folder.
Essentially I'm trying to see if I can cut upgrade costs by just upgrading storage alone.
Another game I play has increased ram usage for added assets in each dlc plus downloaded assets and mods. I have a gaming laptop with 8gb ram however I find large, heavily decorated lots lag a bit even if they're 100% vanilla, and take several seconds to unpause coming out of build mode.
My mods folder is currently 15gb due to only having a 256gb ssd, my back up folder I want to put back in after upgrading my storage is 65gb. Before my desktop stopped working, 11.8 of my 12gb were in use when playing with my 50gb mods folder in. It dropped to about 9gb after removing the mods folder.
Essentially I'm trying to see if I can cut upgrade costs by just upgrading storage alone.
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The more things that the game needs to process, the more it will demand from your computer. From my experience, larger and older saves, larger lots, lots of sims wanting to do things, lots of cc and mods makes your game demand more and will affect your loading times and performance. But how much of these things that will affect specific parts of the game I don't know.
I always recommend having 16 GB RAM for computers these days.
From my experience from upgrading my computer and playing sims4 over 8 years:
Better and faster hard drive - Helps with loading times.
Better and faster graphics card -Helps with how well the game runs, especially rendering lots and also framerate. Although bear in mind that the game does not use this effectively and will still lag sometimes no matter how powerful your GPU is.
More RAM - Helps with game performance overall and handling the things I listed that the game needs to process.
Better CPU - Helps a lot with how well the game runs, and simulation lag.
This isn't about how much RAM capacity you have, this is when you hit the limit. Hitting the limit of your computer RAM, not only with the game but with other applications open at the same time (especially internet browser tabs), will cause the game to struggle, even with no mods. Check how much RAM is being used with the Task Manager.
The struggle mainly comes from the nature of the game, which is to manage a lot of visual assets (objects and clothing). These visual assets are usually not needed (not being displayed on the screen), so they are unloaded, meaning not in RAM. When the game asks for a visual asset, it gets loaded into RAM and transferred to the VRAM for rendering. When RAM is fully used up, something else has to be dropped to free up space, which will cause the game to freeze for a moment. Except you might need some assets even when just moving the camera around because something different is now on the screen, so you will encounter constant freezing.
The size of the lot doesn't matter, but bigger lots usually means more objects, more objects means more unique/different visual assets, more visual assets means a lot of it has to be loaded, but when you are out of RAM, you will get freezing.
The amount of CC in your folder doesn't actually matter if you don't have all of that CC placed in the world, because the assets aren't loaded. The game will definitely load for a longer time because assets need to be indexed and verified in some ways, but they aren't kept in memory unless needed. It's not too different than having a lot of packs installed.
Upgrading storage will not help, but upgrading RAM will. Or see if you can close other applications to free up RAM when playing the game.
Thanks a bunch. I still need to upgrade storage because I don't have enough to hold all the cc I currently have. I already close applications and don't usually have any thing else open when playing
Thank you.
Typically laptops only have one slot for a RAM stick, so you most likely need to take out the 8GB one and put in a bigger one. Look up the name of your laptop, there's most likely information on how many slots you have.
If there are more than one slot and it's empty, you can add more, like another 8GB or more. Check what kind of RAM you have right now (by simply looking at the label on it), not only the type (to fit the laptop) but the speed (MHz) and delay (CL). You want to match the speed and delay for best performance.
Yes, but it's not recommended to combine RAM sticks that are not of the same size, it could work but the general recommendation is to use RAM sticks of the same size and the same manufacturer for pairs working together (one pair from one manufacturer and another pair from another manufacturer works fine).
The common ones are 8, 16 (2x8), 32 (2x16 or 4x8), 64 (4x16).
I ran a check on crucial.com. I have 2 slots
Thank you.