Question on RAM

[xsi_fanatic]

Hello People,

I have 16 GBs of RAM and I'm thinking of upgrading to 32 or 64 GB. Also I'm a Reshift user.

Can anyone confirm as to what I'm supposed to expect after the upgrade ? Which aspects of Softimage will I find improvement in ? Also will it improve performance with any other 3D packages ? In in which aspect ?

I want to know if it is worth the investment.

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Best
XF

[Mathaeus]

That's from another forum: ''RAM is like money, you notice when you dont have enough of it (crash or dramatic slowdown), but having extra doesn't make you any happier."
"Don't have enough" usually means processing a lot of data, I'd believe heavy Lagoa simulation or pre - processing for rendering, traditionally a lot of Mental Ray displacement, really really huge count of polygons. Some other apps are much more memory hungry, for example Houdini, where 16GB is imho working minimum.
For Redshift I think RAM is just a part of calculation, another part is GPU memory, perhaps there's smarter answer on RedShift forums.
Anyway if you won't be running out of RAM, nothing better will happen if you have more.

[Draise]

I think it helps multitasking. I can't run multiple large software systems at the same time due to a ram threshold. I need to upgrade. Most gpu engines will tap heavily into ram, eg. Games. But not sure why though. I've just had games eat up all my ram. 8 gigs is not enough, who knew! I don't have a clue on Redshift though. But from what I know it actually sites its instance cache off the gpu into ram or disc. I could be wrong. ... but I think that was one of Redshift selling points when I was with them in alpha.

I think I am in the state of noticing ram issues. I'd love to be able to render out large geometry caches efficiently before choking my ram by ram to disc bottlenecks - like you plan to be able to. W10 handles ram overload quite well. Your system won't freeze.. but everything does grind to a halt as it starts storing data to a slow hard drive on said multitasking or caching.

16 gig sounds helpful! If not more!

[Rork]

It all depends on your needs I guess.

I run 32Gb of RAM, and have it ever so often used completely with HDRI panorama creation, heavy 3D scenes and/or sims.
Another 32Gb's would be useful, but with smaller projects I have plenty to spare.

Just keep en eye on your TaskManager, and if you run out of RAM often, than yes, upping to 32Gb or more would help. ;)
Not sure how adding more RAM would speed up RedShift, as a lot is handled on the card.

On the other hand, RAM is fairly cheap these days, so not a massive investment on a rig.

rob

[myara]

I've found 16 GB good enough for my work, except when I'm drawing huge textures.
having 4K and 8K textures with lots of layers will eat all your RAM pretty quickly.
Almost all of our PCs use 32GB and it's more than enough.

[xsi_fanatic]

Thanks everyone ! I will most likely upgrade to 32 GB. This is to give my rig more breathing room.