[Solved] How much RAM

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bdudek

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Jul 29, 2019
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at least 3GB i personally use 10Gb but it also depends on the type of hardware you have
 

rhn

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at least 3GB i personally use 10Gb but it also depends on the type of hardware you have
Dont.. that is just..

You will not gain better performance just by throwing more RAM at the game. RAM is the equivalent of "virtual space" for the program to work in. Once you have enough space for the program you NEVER benefit from having more space(seriously a lot of people are getting ripped off buying 16-32GB(which they will never use) PCs thinking it is the shit, not paying any attention to what really matters).

In the case of JAVA you will actually hurt your performance by allocating more RAM. JAVA is horrible at managing RAM and garbage collection, which is why everyone suggest you keep it at the minimum possible and never allocate more than 4GB to the game. New 1.7 packs require more RAM but a medium size pack like DW20 without any high def texture pack will not require anything above 3GB.
 

bdudek

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Jul 29, 2019
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well see thats were i use most my ram i use alot of texture packs that are 64x or 128x
 

rhn

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well see thats were i use most my ram i use alot of texture packs that are 64x or 128x
x64 will/should still not use anything above 3-4GB. x128 might have to go near or slightly above 4GB mark for something as the DW20 pack.
 
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rhn

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to each his own then
Well it is not just my personal opinion. If you look around the forum you will find the vast majority of people warning about this. You should always try to make due with the least amount of RAM allocated to the game as possible(with a certain margin ofc for stability) and try and keep it under the 4GB mark. Only if you are forced to go above 4GB due to something like x128-512 texturepacks etc. should you do so, and in that case only if you take steps in form of JAVA arguments to better garbage handling or possible even secondary programs to deal with the problems it arise.

RAM is and never has been a performance parameter. After you have enough, then more will not help one bit...
 
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zemerick

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Jul 29, 2019
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...seriously a lot of people are getting ripped off buying 16-32GB(which they will never use)...

That part isn't true any more. I constantly have out of memory issues with only 8GB. 16GB is the bare minimum for a gaming rig now, and 32GB would give you nice headroom for the future. Especially since we are moving into 4k, we should see a leap in textures and models, and thus RAM required. ( There's a reason Nvidia just announced a video card with 12GB of RAM on it. ) They're also starting on 8k monitors and TVs, which would necessitate another leap in the textures and models so that their lack of detail does not show with the higher res.

RAM is and never has been a performance parameter. After you have enough, then more will not help one bit...

Also wanted to clarify this a bit. True in the case of Minecraft, but not gaming in general. There is the speed ( as well as latencies ) of the RAM which makes a big difference, as well as simply the amount in most games. Typically you can use more memory than you have RAM thanks to the pagefile. However, it's notoriously slow, so having more RAM will give you a significant performance impact. Naturally as a gamer, I would personally say that if you are getting into the pagefile, then you NEED more RAM, but others are content with it just working.

Again though, it should be noted that in the context of minecraft, everything you said is pretty valid due to the limitations of Java:) However, every version this is getting better. Their focus for awhile now has been improved memory handling and garbage collection. Java 8 already saw pretty big leaps here, and I believe they said 9 is supposed to be centered around that as well.
 

DriftinFool

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well see thats were i use most my ram i use alot of texture packs that are 64x or 128x

I am running 64x packs with 3 gigs completely smooth at 70 FPS. It actually got smoother with less lag spikes when I dropped down from 4.
 

Oraia

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Jul 29, 2019
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Personally, I can run FTB Monster with 2GB and Java 6 32 bit... I don't know how, but ... it works !
 
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bdudek

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Jul 29, 2019
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I say again to each his own. Every computer is different and i found that with my computer the packs dont run well for me under 4gb. Do i need to use 10gb. Probably not but i am one of those people who is like if i got it why not use it.
 

Hambeau

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More memory can be useful... Outside the game. For example, in the days of DOS when you needed special drivers to be able to use more than 640K ram, we used the extra ram between 640k-1MB to stuff drivers into, and anything above that as a Ramdisk. We'd actually copy the game to the ramdisk where it ran faster because of ram access times and not having to bother with rotational delay and seek time.

Technically this concept should still work, perhaps even better since we now have direct access to the upper ram... Judging from the specifications I've seen for SSDs a ramdisk could easily outperform one.
 

GreenZombie

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There is no reason to be random about this.

Load a save using your modpack.
Press F3
Look at the top right of the screen.

See allocated memory? That is the peak memory mc has used. You don't, technically, need any more memory than that number... Any more than that in fact will harm performance.

So look at that number after a bit of playing. Add 20% or whatever you deem a good safety buffer. And use the result as your XMX allocation.
 

zemerick

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Jul 29, 2019
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More memory can be useful... Outside the game. For example, in the days of DOS when you needed special drivers to be able to use more than 640K ram, we used the extra ram between 640k-1MB to stuff drivers into, and anything above that as a Ramdisk. We'd actually copy the game to the ramdisk where it ran faster because of ram access times and not having to bother with rotational delay and seek time.

Technically this concept should still work, perhaps even better since we now have direct access to the upper ram... Judging from the specifications I've seen for SSDs a ramdisk could easily outperform one.

Yup, someone made a program to load SWTOR onto a RAMdisk, and it works quite well. This would be particularly beneficial to MMOs, and other games with a high amount of loading. ( Detailed open world games for example, like GTA 5. MC probably wouldn't see too much though except for servers. )
 

b0bst3r

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There's a big problem with launchers (affects MMC too) that use a console alongside the actual game. If that console starts receiving lots of spam then memory use will spike horribly. I was finding some mod packs were erroring that much that the console thread of java was using MORE RAM than the actual game was.

I also think a lot of people are experiencing this and not realising it, it's down to bad packs causing errors and bad launchers for not releasing the RAM at regular intervals.
 

epidemia78

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1.7.1 at this point in time, runs better for me than any version of minecraft has. Except vanilla of course.
 

Hambeau

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1.7.1 at this point in time, runs better for me than any version of minecraft has. Except vanilla of course.

Is that 1.7.1 or 1.7.10? Two different versions... 1.7.1 was a snapshot just before release 1.7.2 and while the first 1.7 MC versions were an improvement over 1.6 a rendering bug apparently crept back into 1.7.10...