Classic British Flight Sim

I seem to remember hearing that FS 2004 will not use more than 2 Gig of RAM. Does any one know how much RAM FS X will access? I don't know whether it will be worth buying a little more while it's still cheap. ..

Hi, not sure myself but on my 4gig system im using upto about 3.6gig while running FSX. Im going to try out with another set of 4gig i have just recieved that is currently sat here at work...

It's not so much to do with the sim as to do with your operating system. Unless you're running the 64 bit versions of Vista or XP you may as well only ever upgrade to a maximum of 4GB as Windows will only really be able to use anything under about 3.5GB downwards, depending on your system (they vary on occasion). The reason you can install 4GB but you'll see less than that is because 4GB is the total upper limit that the operating system can use across both physical and virtual memory, and some of it has to be allocated to hardware.

I do recommend doing a 4GB upgrade anyway as RAM is so cheap that it beats buggering around with mis-matched DIMM's to get random amounts of memory.

Some good reading on the subject:

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/Windows ... ileEtc.htm

Without changing your opperating system from the default settings no 32bit application can use more that 2GB of RAM regardless of how much of it you have installed and regardless of whether its 64bit or not. This applies to both FS9 and FSX and is a limitation in windows (by default) ;-)

Ben Watson wrote:Without changing your opperating system from the default settings no 32bit application can use more that 2GB of RAM regardless of how much of it you have installed and regardless of whether its 64bit or not. This applies to both FS9 and FSX and is a limitation in windows (by default) ;-)

But that does not mean that an upgrade is not worthwhile, someone with 4GB will still see quite a large performance increase over someone with 2GB in 32bit applications and operating systems. Rather the 4GB user will have the full 2GB clear for Windows to allocate for running programs, whilst this obviously can't be done if you only have 2GB of physical RAM installed in the machine.

What you say is partially true, however it is no excuse to not upgrade from 2GB, especially with RAM prices so cheap at the moment.

Yep Chris, your spot on. I was just pointing out that no 32bit app on default settings can use more than 2 GB, obviously if you've only 2GB to start with, it will be less. thanks for clarifying ;-)

O.K. thanks for the comments. I get the impression that the general concensus of opinion is that ,if (as I am) I am running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 6000+. with 4.00 Gb DDR 2 667MHz RAM, and windows Vista ultimate 64, and an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT+ graphics card. That the addition of an extra 4 Gig of RAM will not be a bad thing where FS X is concerned?

By the way the Vulcan avatar is fabulous..

timholyoake wrote:I seem to remember hearing that FS 2004 will not use more than 2 Gig of RAM.

All is not lost for FS2004 - there is a patch available at http://ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php which upgrades games to use 4 GB RAM if it is there.

I have been using it for ages now, with no adverse effects. Its main benefit is that it eliminates those annoying "out of memory" errors when you reach a large add-on airport at the end of a flight.

John

I still have 2004 up and running. And I love it. Does this patch mean that in a system with a 64 bit OS that FS 2004 is actually accessing the full 4 Gig already? and can I get it to access 8 Gig if it is available?

Well installed the other 4 gig last night, didnt see much of an inprovement but i did see better textures over distance!

The Vulcan avitar is actually the JF Vulcan in FSX... Got to redo it with the IRIS Vulcan...