RAM and turn times

srpt

Deist
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will doubling my RAM from 4GB to 8GB significantly lower turn times on large maps with many players? my processor is dual 3.10ish if that matters.

thanks
 
will doubling my RAM from 4GB to 8GB significantly lower turn times on large maps with many players? my processor is dual 3.10ish if that matters.
Probably not.

BTS is large address aware, meaning that it can use more than 2 GB of RAM, but I don't think it can actually use more than 4 GB. I assume that you're playing on a 64 bit system, yes?

There are a couple of things I've found that can shorten turn times:

1. Raw clock speed. This should be obvious.
2. Having more than two cores. This isn't so obvious. While it's true that Civ is only coded for one core, Windows has a lot of overhead to deal with. The more cores you have, the more that overhead gets distributed. This leaves the "Civ core" less cluttered and it can deal with Civ more efficiently and run the game faster.
3. Having lots of graphics memory. Having a graphics card with more than 1GB of RAM actually does seem to help. The game has to page out the currently unused graphics less when you have more GPU RAM. This equates to fewer clock cycles wasted by the CPU shedding unused graphics, only to reload them again. What you currently see on the screen is what is held in graphics memory and everything else is unloaded, or paged out to make room for it. There is room in most graphic cards for a few screens, but the fewer trips the GPU has to make to main system RAM to page in graphics means better performance in the long run.

So, basically, the short answer is: Don't waste your money on more system RAM.
 
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