How much ram?

I see peoples builds on here and they are running 32gb, or even 64gb. Why so much? I run 16gb and havent had it top out yet doing anything. I can hit maybe 75%. I dont do video editing though. Im just wondering coming from gaming and knowing those guys are spec-a-holics and very few run more than 32gb, with most still at 16gb.

I think a lot of folks doing video are using RAM disks, for maximum interactive performance. You will have a far more responsive machine when editing video if you are reading your source files from a RAM disk than even using a good SSD. The closer you can keep the data to the processor, generally the faster you can get to it.

Alan

From my experience Windows (now 10) runs much smoother when you disable swap altogether (even if it was on SSD). That of course means you can not run out of RAM, else you programs may crash and system gets buggy, so you'll need as much free RAM as you can get I have managed with 24Gb fine, but next PC will have 32Gb and leave a couple of free slots there for more later.

I have 16 GB, use Lightroom, PS Elements, Premiere Elements, Chrome, MS Office, etc. The only time I want more is when I need to run several virtual machines at once. I might install 32 GB on my next PC if the cost isn't too bad. Other than that, 16 GB is fine. It is a second generation i7 (still benchmarks better than most new PCs) and I have 3 SSDs.

gmm213 wrote in post #18382495
I see peoples builds on here and they are running 32gb, or even 64gb. Why so much? I run 16gb and havent had it top out yet doing anything. I can hit maybe 75%. I dont do video editing though. Im just wondering coming from gaming and knowing those guys are spec-a-holics and very few run more than 32gb, with most still at 16gb.

When you run several pieces of processing/editing software simultaneously, you will notice how fast your memory capacity is soaked up. Lots of these software(s) each like to have a scratch disk to work from, and HD's are really slow and unresponsive for this kind of stuff, compared to SSD and RAM (a ram disk was already mentioned). Also, as image files increase in size, they just take up more and more space in memory. In photoshop for example, each time you add a layer, you increase the file size massively. I've gotten a few images upwards of 1Gb from layers and stuff. Just one image. Nevermind video editing with layers! You will quickly eat up RAM if you're doing more than one basic task. Most people don't need more than 4~8Gb, and even then, probably wouldn't notice. But, if you're running several softwares, each doing some processing, and working with lots of editing, you'll greatly appreciate copious amounts of RAM and SSD capacity as you'll gobble it up fast.

RAM is so cheap now. For $99 you can get $250 SSD that can be your scratch disk. But it's still slower than RAM, and you can get 16Gb for $115 pretty commonly, and $250 you can slam 32Gb in there and use that as a scratch and its much faster, blazing fast, instant work, no lag and wait. This is commonly why we do it. There are high capacity SSD's that are very fast that use specific PCIe slots instead of SATA (bottleneck in many ways), just get it right on the bus of the system. But they're costly. So just piling up RAM can be a cheaper way to get fast performance for this kind of stuff.

Some of us also use tons of RAM as a virtual disk (ram disk) because we can capture data from a high speed camera without a slow hard drive, or even a SSD, being a bottleneck. Examples would be monochrome planetary, solar, lunar imagers who are capturing 20,000 frames at 150fps~300fps at a time, then move it from ram disk to high capacity hard drive, then do another capture sequence.

Very best,

Once I had opened so many 16-bit TIFF files (with layers and what not) in Photoshop CS4 that I reached over 99% memory usage of my 16GB of RAM, and the machine essentially halted. It took several minutes for it to be responsive enough to let me start closing tabs in order to free enough RAM to be able to save changes and close even more files.

Soon after, I upped the RAM to 32GB, which is the maximum my mobo can take. Curiously enough, though, some applications became a wee bit more sluggish with more RAM than with less; but at least the machine has never halted again due to saturated memory.

gmm213 wrote in post #18382495
I see peoples builds on here and they are running 32gb, or even 64gb. Why so much? I run 16gb and havent had it top out yet doing anything. I can hit maybe 75%. I dont do video editing though. Im just wondering coming from gaming and knowing those guys are spec-a-holics and very few run more than 32gb, with most still at 16gb.

I was contracted to stitch 10 XF3 100 mp RAW images together last year, that used nearly 58Gb RAM to render out the final image With higher res. cameras RAM becomes more important especially if you edit multi-layer/smart object PSDs (think 30mp +).

The other advantage is that I can create RAM disks for scratch files.

Very Nice Information?

Most people won't benefit much over 16GB for most things. Things people have mentioned on this thread are verging on extreme - large raw panoramas, opening many layered TIFF files. I've never needed to do any of that, and I've been a professional photographer for ten years and an enthusiast for longer. Even doing a little bit of family video processing is fine on 16GB. It takes time to render, but that's based on CPU not RAM.

Having swap on SSD means your performance penalty to swap is lower than disk.

For the time being. Yet, as things move forward, OSes and programs become more resource hungry. With cameras increasing in resolution and the inchoate boom of the digital 'medium format', file sizes will soon double, requiring more RAM.

When I got my first computer it had a 200 MB hard disk, which a friend of mine said 'you'll NEVER fill that up'...

Alveric wrote in post #18384458
When I got my first computer it had a 200 MB hard disk, which a friend of mine said 'you'll NEVER fill that up'...

I once got a a very expensive 30MB (yes, megabytes) SCSI hard disk for my Atari and I was so happy with that enormous size and speed

Alveric wrote in post #18384458
For the time being. Yet, as things move forward, OSes and programs become more resource hungry. With cameras increasing in resolution and the inchoate boom of the digital 'medium format', file sizes will soon double, requiring more RAM.

When I got my first computer it had a 200 MB hard disk, which a friend of mine said 'you'll NEVER fill that up'...

I use a 12MP camera, so my working set of hundreds of RAW images fits in 16GB RAM. Say RAW files were 100MB, computer has 16GB RAM, and 4GB is used, that would still mean 120 images can be stored in memory. Given I/O speed is increasing, and software is getting smarter at caching on SSDs and using smart previews, I don't think it's going to be a huge problem.

If I bought a computer now as a professional photographer with a high MP camera, I might get 32GB. Taking photos of family 16GB is still plenty. 8GB is fine for people who don't do much image work. An SSD is im

Wow i never thought one would find +16GB more useful for photo editing, i guess more RAM does have an advantage even for photo editing.
Im not the world expert on RAM but I'm going to just throw this out there (assumptions):

- I'm guessing ultra tons amounts of RAM might be useful if for some reason you find a software that can store the entire photo data on the RAM for the CPU to quickly access it and have ultrafast editing since RAM chips are next to the CPU this might be the reason why PCs might be faster with photo previews/editing with more RAM.

@Alveric

I think the reason why some apps are now slower is because you upgraded your PC with the wrong kind of RAM, not any RAM would give you the boost is supposed to give you. It's adviceable for both RAMs to be of the same size 16GB +16GB (instead of 8GB +8GB +16GB) and the same tech (DDR4, DDR3) maybe the brand so the CPU can access and retrieve data from both at the same time different techs might take different times so your CPU might be sluggish with some software that are affected with that. i dont know what they call that RAM phenomena...i recently found out myself after trying to buy a computer for photo editing.

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Soujiro wrote in post #18388565
[..]

@Alveric

I think the reason why some apps are now slower is because you upgraded your PC with the wrong kind of RAM, not any RAM would give you the boost is supposed to give you. It's adviceable for both RAMs to be of the same size 16GB +16GB (instead of 8GB +8GB +16GB) and the same tech (DDR4, DDR3) maybe the brand so the CPU can access and retrieve data from both at the same time different techs might take different times so your CPU might be sluggish with some software that are affected with that. i dont know what they call that RAM phenomena...i recently found out myself after trying to buy a computer for photo editing.

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Oh, no. Trust me, I woulda been uberly careful about that. All my sticks are the same kind (manufacturer, size, timings, &c.) and running in dual channel.

MalVeauX wrote in post #18382726
When you run several pieces of processing/editing software simultaneously, you will notice how fast your memory capacity is soaked up,

This is the point that touches me. It's not unusual for me to have Photoshop open with Premiere Pro and After Effects, then open Audacity and a separate video window.