Quote:Original post by XaosII Still, it strikes me a bit odd at the huge disparity of memory consumption and usage for PC games. Im aware the OS, in general, eats up a fair chunk of memory, but even looking at the task manager and how much memory the game allocates for itself, its not unusual to see 1GB+ memory committed to the game - and thats not even counting what it could possibly be taking up in the page file!
On Windows, the page file is your memory. The OS will store pages of memory in the page file when memory is requested and there isn't any available physical memory to use. The application is normally not aware of any of this. So, a 2GB app will work happily on a system with 0.5GB of physical ram, albeit a bit slower. The value listed in task manager is the total logical memory the application has allocated regardless of its physical location - actual ram or page file.
As anyone who regularly uses a Linux system will tell you, there is rarely more than 1% of the system memory free. This is because the Linux developers live by the saying "Free memory is wasted memory". ig. if memory is free it isn't being used, and hence wasted. Therefor Linux allocates all free memory for things like disk and IPC buffers. This may only improve performance by a small percent over having 50% free memory and smaller buffers but there is no cost.
I suspect game devs work with the idea that there game will have almost total access to the machine (they don't really plan for you to be playing their game and at the same time running a high load database server). So, if they can get a 2-5% improvement in performance by using all the system memory (when that memory is free), they will.
When the RAM is available, they will optimize for speed (FPS being the most likely metric) rather than memory or CPU usage, games aren't normally written to be used at the same time as other apps.
Quote:Original post by Arrummzen_ As anyone who regularly uses a Linux system will tell you, there is rarely more than 1% of the system memory free. This is because the Linux developers live by the saying "Free memory is wasted memory". ig. if memory is free it isn't being used, and hence wasted. Therefor Linux allocates all free memory for things like disk and IPC buffers. This may only improve performance by a small percent over having 50% free memory and smaller buffers but there is no cost.
Windows does much the same thing, Vista being the most agressive thus far when it comes to using physical ram for caches... unfortunately all this leads to is complaints about 'bloat' and 'why is all my ram in use'...
