I wasn't specific enough when I was talking about Doom/Doom 2. There was a program called DeHacked that was sold that edited the Doom/Doom2 executable file to customize the game. It wasn't a patch but it was a third party program that was designed to edit iD's executable.

There WILL be serious modded games.

And depending of how is Skyrim, I wouldn't be surprised it could benefit from more than 2-4 gbs of memory allocation.

Yep. I have 12GB of RAM, I would love to see a modded Skyrim taking up 8-10GB.

You arbitrarily want it to take up most of your RAM? There would be absolutely no need for it to use that much RAM, even modded. Sure they could do it, but there's no reason to. I could make a web page that uses all high resolution bitmaps and claim I made a page with several hundred megabytes of content... does that make the page better?

Oblivion can get very, very heavy. If Skyrim's engine scales better than Oblivion's did, then 5 years down the line, using 8GB of RAM may not be so silly. Even now, heavily modded oblivion can get to 2GB RAM, and RAM is often not the limiting factor, rather lackluster multithreading support and poor graphical optimisation put an end to your modding spree before memory constraints do.

Certainly having a 64 bit option for modders is ideal, but I highly doubt modders would take Skyrim anywhere near 8-10GB of RAM usage.

Well, I doubt there are many who predicted the heights Morrowind would achieve eventually. A 32bit architecture is quickly becoming too small.

No, because you haven't optimized it. But even with optimized content, the more detail/objects/content/LOD/etc you put = the more RAM it eats. It's that simple. And it has been that way since the famous 640 kb' quote days.

Unless you want to use procedural content, that's simply the way things work.

I think I can understand where he's coming from.

I have 16GB RAM in my laptop and this only gets utilized when working with extremely large files in Photoshop, Creative Suite, etc.

Vanilla Oblivion runs at constant 60 fps at 1920x1080, all detail settings maxed, but after installing 100-200 mods, it slows to a crawl, even though I patched the executable with the NTCore 4GB patch.

If enabling the use of additional RAM that is sitting idle could somehow help to improve the frame rate, that would be great. I don't expect this to be the case, however.

Because its crossplatform with consoles, and many of those games so far are only built for 360 level hardware(like only being DX9). Like say, Dragon Age or Fallout(I think Fallout was only 32bit?).

My point is that 8-10GB of RAM amounts to likely over half the total amount of data all of the game's assets take up... combined. I just don't see such RAM usage happening on Skyrim's engine. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. 4-5GB of RAM usage would be huge in itself considering the consoles the game can run on only use 512MB total. Video cards use what, up to 2GB of graphics RAM for the high end cards right now? Just what could possibly take up 8-10GB of system RAM for Skyrim? 8-10 binary billions of bytes is a colossal number. Perhaps I took that post too seriously though I'll admit, since I still agree with the premise that options are good. Even if they don't release a 64 bit version I bet the mods will still look fantastic though.

If you can load the whole game into RAM it would make loading times shorter, no?

EDIT: When I put my computer together almost 2 years ago I only bought 4GB of RAM, because only 1 company had low latency DDR3 RAM and none of the programs are bottle-necked at 4GB. When programs start to use the RAM I will buy more/upgrade my RAM.

Yes. But that has been already mitigated with SSD's.

A SSD HD is more prone to data corruption from unstable/dirty power lines....

It's safe enough for half the PC gaming world to be using it.

Plus, put any sort of magnet near your PC case, and there's a nice chance of your data being also corrupted. The fact HDD's have been here longer doesn't mean they're a safe storage device. In fact, there is none.

Besides, if you suspect your power line is unstable or dirty, it'd be a sin to buy a new computer and not installing an UPS...

I have dual Intel SSDs in Raid0 in my laptop, with sequential read time in the range of 500-550 MB/s. Vanilla oblivion load times are a couple seconds to load the game, going from interior to exterior load time is almost nothing.

With a large number of mods installed, it takes 30-40 seconds to load a save game.

I don't think more RAM would improve this much, but the best scenario would be if Skyrim doesn't require a large number of texture and graphics mods to make it look beautiful.

EDIT: Or maybe it would be improved if the mod files don't need to be compressed to the extent they are with Oblivion mods.

Why on earth would you be inspired to put two SSDs in raid 0? Surely the increased risk of data loss due to using a raid 0 array is not worth the marginal gain in speed by taking two already extremely fast read drives and doing that?

Secondly, SSDs are currently extremely expensive per unit of memory compared to HDDs. There is no way "half" of PC gamers use them. I'm considering using one the next time I get a computer, but if they are still very expensive then at least it's simple enough to get one later down the road. I'd probably put the OS/program data on the drive and do weekly backups onto a larger data drive, with monthly backups to an external drive. Heck with a modern computer backups to the HDDs from the SSD could probably be done daily with no fuss, even while a game or other programs are running. I agree the risk of data loss (with a proper backup solution) shouldn't be a worry.

wow, amazing....I'm DEFINITELY getting a good SSD solution for my new PC build

And with those specs...well, logically RAM is (and will be for quite a while) much faster that even Raid0 SSD's. but as I said, they've already mitigated the problem, and quite a lot.



Marginal? You've no idea of what you're talking about, aren't you?

Single HDD: Max: 130 mb/s
Single SSD with actual technology: 230 mb/s
Single SSD with new technology (recently released, not sure if it's even avaliable to the public): 460 mb/s.

So 500-550 mb with actual SSD tech (even using Raid0) is just amazing. And I doubt any HDD config would match those speeds, because SSD's are faster just by nature.

And you can get a 64 gbs SSD for 100 euros. That's enough for the OS and the games/apps you use the most, at least for me. SSD's aren't supposed to be "exclusive" by now, but to use along with a massive storage-oriented HDD. We're in a sort of a transition stage right now.

I Expect a 32-bit game, but I sure would like a 64-bit binary if they can spin us one. At minimum more memory can't be a bad thing, it could extend the cell buffers out further and reduce loading times!

I dont know anyone who pc games who doesn't have a 64-bit system, and a quadcore or better. Seriously bro's

Raid 0's benefits are not that great unless dealing with very large files, unless this is different for SSDs. Using raid 0 for HDDs does not particularly help much for video gaming, I know that much. Perhaps it is different for SSDs.

I still think that's a rather pricey and risky thing to do (without daily backups) though, considering SSDs are extremely fast as is. It literally amounts to paying 100+ dollars more just to go from loading everything in seconds (or even less than a second) to... loading everything in a bit less seconds/fraction of a second.

Loads game unto Ram disk

then proceed to laugh at people using SSD's.

You're right...it's different. SSD's does not have mechanical plates and seekers that benefit from large, unfragmented data files. Plus, with TRIM activated, they don't suffer from fragmentation.



It's like everything...you pay for the tech you get. And recent tech (SSD's are) are always more expensive. If you wait a bit, they'll both get cheaper and more reliable. But you cannot stop evolution, and HDD's are almost museum meat, just like 3,5" diskettes.



Again, you're missing the entire point. Plus, that's impossible.

SSDs are not "marginally faster" - indeed, it's not even a straight "X% faster under Y conditions".

A hard drive is made of spinning magnetic platters. If you want to read something on the other side of the disk, that platter has to physically spin. Disk read lag is measured in milliseconds, and that adds up for every file - SSDs have no moving parts. Much like RAM, accessing a random byte is no slower or faster than accessing any other random byte. Even if an SSD's read and write speed wasn't on the order of 10 or 20 times that (depending on model) of a standard drive, the responsiveness of not having read lag would help.

Personally, I would never run RAID 0 for SSDs, but then, I wouldn't do it for HDDs either. SSDs effectively only die through extreme force, or wear (And for modern SSDs that wear is measured in decades, rather than years), wheras there's a *lot* more to go wrong on a HDD. Moving parts are not the future, solid state is.

@Benrahir; Actually, if you have enough RAM, loading games into a RAMdisk is a great idea. Pretty much instant read and write - though you need an awful lot of RAM to make sure nothing starts hitting swap.