by wkitty42 » Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:07 pm
i agree... that's definitely not a fair point... i have 16Gig of RAM here and FG can easily eat it all and toss me into swap misery if i make some really long flights and have scenery options turned up too high or my LODs too large... one has to determine the level of realism they want with the hardware they have... the higher the level of realism, the more memory required...
even if i upgraded my video card, for example, and replaced the $60US card i now have with a $300+US card, that won't help the memory consumption... it might help with the frame rate but not if the bottleneck is elsewhere... doubling my RAM may help with the larger amount of data needed for those long flights... especially if we're flying at 35000ft and have our LOD set so that we do actually load the tiles all the way out to 370km from our location... 370km away is where the horizon is when you're 35000ft in the air... go up to 40000ft or higher and you'll start seeing the tile edges unless you increase the LOD to compensate and that's going to require even more memory...
that's a lot of tile data and it isn't just that that's in front of you... the sim doesn't know if or when you'll look to the side or behind you so that data is also loaded... we won't even mention the memory needed for the really detailed areas of the earth (eg: Paris, France) and all the 3D object models that are loaded in those places... this will get heavier, too, as more OSM (Open Street Maps) data is worked into the sim to add even more realism...
heck, a lot of computer systems are sold with the minimum amount of RAM the installed OS needs to operate... folks don't even know they're swapping all the time and even more when they load more apps that sit in the system tray running all the time... doubling or quadrupling the RAM in those machines generally makes them amazingly fast once they have enough memory to operate in without having to swap memory to disk to make more room for another task to do something... once the OS is happy, other things will be more happy but it may still take additional RAM to get everything loaded and running in memory... especially if one is running a program that uses a huge amount of data like FG can...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."