Would 16GB of RAM help?

[Recon]

You know, I've been wondering how on earth anyone can run all the mods in say, the DW20 pack, without slowdown issues.

I've been making my own modified version of this pack for a while now, and I am just about finished with the 1.5.2 version of it, along with most of the textures updated to Sphax (which seems to be the best option for this type of thing).

Problem is, with 100+ mods loaded, the 128x textures bring on some serious performance problems. The game takes AGES to load, and I get frequent pauses in the animation flow. Switching to 64x helps but doesn't look as good. Some people run even higher. But how?

My system is an Intel Sandybridge CPU (i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz.)
Gigabyte Z68A-D3-B3 mainboard.
8GB Corsair DDR3 RAM.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB RAM.

Not top of the line but pretty good still, I suspect. I was thinking maybe if I put another 8GB in that minecraft would behave better? Anybody know what this type of game with so many mods and textures really needs to run smooth?

Thanks.

 

[Chris Messmer]

Usually minecraft doesn't need that much ram at all. But since this is FTB the top you would need is probably 2-3 gigs of ram. Maybe even less then that. But don't allocate all of the ram, if you do that it has the chance of making minecraft even more laggy.

 

[casilleroatr]

Have you increased the memory allocation to java and also permgen space. If not you can edit it in settings for MultiMC by increasing the max memory allocation slider in the Java tab and typing this into JVM arguments
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m.

Even so, save your money. From what I have heard, the bottleneck is usually found in your processor.

 

[AlwaysGoofingOff]

But don't allocate all of the ram, if you do that it has the chance of making minecraft even more laggy.

Curious, why? Does it have something to do with garbage collection? I don't fully understand it but I always thought more=better when it comes to RAM availability for a game?

 

[Blu_Haze]

Make sure that you have VSync turned off and Performance set to MaxFPS.

If you don't then Minecraft will often limit your frame rate even if your machine is capable of more. This can cause your FPS to dip down lower than it normally would and create slowdowns.

As far as hardware changes go your best bet would be to overlcock your processor at this point. Minecraft is fairly CPU bound and a faster clock speed would net you the best increase in performance so long as the rest of your hardware is adequate. Get an aftermarket heatsink if you haven't already and try to get your clock speed as close to 4+GHz as you can without raising the voltage much.

As long as you have at least 6GB of RAM then adding more will not help you. I would even advise against running Minecraft with any more than 3GB to 4GB.

Curious, why? Does it have something to do with garbage collection? I don't fully understand it but I always thought more=better when it comes to RAM availability for a game?

I'm no java expert but, from the little bit of research I've done on the subject in the past, I would say yes that's pretty much the jist of it. Java isn't exactly the best at garbage collection to begin with, and if you feed it a large excess amount of RAM then it gets even less efficient about cleaning up after itself and becomes bloated.

 

[LeQwasd]

Also if you manage to fill large amounts of RAM, java may start to make page files into hard drive - flushing RAM content into file. When the game will need to access paged RAM content, speed will be as slow as your hard drive.

 

[SatanicSanta]

Sometimes less is more. I would say allocate 1-2GB.

 

[neour1]

Knowing minecraft, I'll say that a MAXIMUM of 6Gb of Ram allocated, I have 32gbs and more often then not, I get Out of Memory screens.

Quick-Tip: More RAM You allocate, more minecraft will use for nothing

Sorry for my english

 

[Lord Wumbo]

Minecraft does not need 16 gigabytes of RAM, try upgrading your video card.

 

[schyman]

Quite a lot can be gained by fiddling around with settings and trying different things. From what I've heard, different computers like different settings.

Also consider Optifine if you haven't already. It's really hit or miss, for some people it increases performance - for others it drops it. I gained about 5 fps average from it on Ultimate (haven't compared in unleashed), which is nice by itself, but the main benefit for me was that it stabilized the FPS - while my tops didn't go up, my bottoms did quite a lot and I rarely drop below 20 fps (which happens a lot without optifine for me).

Took a while to figure out optimal settings though, as some things that should speed things up slowed me down (multicore chunkloading for example).

For others, it just leads to issues. So test it if you haven't, other than that, test disabling smooth lighting, and as you've said already a lower resolution texture pack might increase performance.

 

[Blu_Haze]

Also consider Optifine if you haven't already.

Just wanted to point out that from 1.5+ a lot of the performance increasing tweaks have been integrated into Forge. In addition to better performance it also now supports HD textures, skins, and fonts out of the box. Now that Forge by itself can handle a lot of what Optifine offered I would only really suggest installing Optifine as a very last resort.

Optifine was great for a while, and I'm not knocking it, but these days the benefits seem to be dwarfed by the negatives. Optifine really doesn't play well with many mods out there and even breaks a lot of the rendering code that many modders depend on to work properly.

 

[SonOfABirch]

Vanilla Textures: 150fps
Sphax: 0fps.. well.. actually I wouldn't know.. never used and never will use that horrible texure pack.

 

[Blu_Haze]

Vanilla Textures: 150fps
Sphax: 0fps.. well.. actually I wouldn't know.. never used and never will use that horrible texure pack.

Try to be constructive.

Posting something like that adds zero value to the thread and only serves to annoy those that do like it. Textures packs, like most things in life, are all about personal preference. Just because you do not happen to like it does not make it "horrible".

 

[Recon]

hmm lots of interesting tips.

Regarding my CPU I'm not really open to upgrading that, as it would be very expensive. The Sandybridge is supposed to be a decent processor and mine is water cooled although I am not familiar with how to overclock it so I don't know how to do that or how far it can be pushed safely.

Regarding my video card, when my last one died, I bought a GTX 460 and have been very happy with it. I have yet to find a game except Minecraft that I can't run at max settings smoothly. Its also an extremely quiet card, which I like. In my research for a card choice, I noted that pretty much anything faster than the GTX 460 has very loud fans for the performance increase.


For JVM Arguments, I'm using this:
-Xms512m -XXermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=512m

I set the Minimum Memory Allication to 3000 and Maximum to 5000.

I am using Optifine Ultra HD U D5.
The settings I have not yet tweaked, so they are set to the defaults as follows ...
Render Distance Far
Graphics Fancy
Performance I had set to 120 FPS but I'll change it to Max FPS to see if that helps
Smooth Lighting Maximum 100%
Advanced OpenGL Off
Chunk Loading I did set to Multi Core.
Fog Fast
Server Textures On
Quality Settings are all set to on except anisotropic filtering, mipmap level, antialiasing, better grass, better snow and natural textures which are all off.
A lot of these could probably be tweaked for better performance but I really don't know which ones would help. I'd like it to look as good as it can without hurting performance, but some settings probably have more of an impact than others.


For textures, I'm using the Sphax 128x across the board, but I'm making an alternate texture pack that starts with the 128x vanilla as a base, and am adding 64x textures for all the mods to it. Minecraft seems perfectly ok merging 128x and 64x textures in the same zip file surprisingly.


[EDIT]
Well I tweaked the Optifine settings (a lot of them) and tried loading up my testworld again. My FPS is now over 140 where before it was about 25.

Also regarding the negative comment toward Sphax - I don't know how people can play with all these mods using Vanilla textures. They're simply horrific, and unnecessarily low resolution. With the thousands upon thousands of blocks and items in the game, things look fairly difficult to distinguish from one another at that resolution. Its crap. If you have an alternate to Sphax which is popular enough to have textures for almost all the good mods, then feel free to name it. I use Sphax because I can get consistent looking textures for almost everything in the game, and it has an extremely active community constantly making new textures for new stuff. Name any proper alternative and I'll take a look.

 

[schyman]

Well, as others have said, you can try disabling optifine, that may very well get you better FPS. When it comes to settings, try
setting advanced opengl to fast or fancy
chunk loading to smooth instead of multicore (that helped for me),
"graphics" to fast but changing all individual graphics to fancy in their respective menus (have heard several say this aided them, to me it didn't do noticable difference).

Try them one at a time, then all together. Some may help, some may not.

 

[namiasdf]

Though RAM is very important, I don't think you'll need more than 8 GB. I've yet to exceed 2 GB personally, looking at my F3.

Convert some of that to RamDISK, install optifine and then see how much better your performance is. (Usually doubled FPS and loading times from launcher & ingame)

 

[lolpierandom]

There'd be no reason to buy a new CPU. The 2600k is still pretty top-notch, though most of SB's prowess comes from its excellent overclockability compared to IB and Haswell.

 

[netmc]

If you haven't already, try updating the LWJGL libraries. The ones Minecraft ships with are rather old. It may not increase the fps, but it may help increase the responsiveness of Minecraft.

 

[Bigglesworth]

1. Your CPU is more than enough.
2. Your GPU is questionable with high res texture packs and MC. (I have a 460GTX; It didnt really like it when I tried either)
3. No more RAM will not help
4. Make sure Optifine is fully updated.
5. DO NOT update the libraries. They add more bugs than they remove in MC.
6. You can try a RAMDisk, and if the stars align it might accidentally indirectly help.

Make sure you have the latest 64Bit Java installed before you fuck with anything else.

 

[PoisonWolf]

1. Your CPU is more than enough.
2. Your GPU is questionable with high res texture packs and MC. (I have a 460GTX; It didnt really like it when I tried either)
3. No more RAM will not help
4. Make sure Optifine is fully updated.
5. DO NOT update the libraries. They add more bugs than they remove in MC.
6. You can try a RAMDisk, and if the stars align it might accidentally indirectly help.

Make sure you have the latest 64Bit Java installed before you fuck with anything else.

While ramdisk helps somewhat on client-side, I find that the effect is more pronounced on the serverside, when there is heavy io load (e.g., imagine 10 players with gravichest armors flying with boost in 10 different directions on a server running on SSD vs Ramdisk).