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New video card--do I need more RAM before I use it?

3WC3WC Posts: 1,107
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

New video card--do I need more RAM before I use it?

I currently have an Nvidia gtx 1660, a ryzen 5, and 16gb ram (ddr3). I just bought an Nvidia rtx 3060 12 gb to upgrade. I have seen in these forums that it is a good rule of thumb to have 3x ram as vram, so I need minimum 36 gb. I have planned that as a future upgrade, but my question is this: will it hurt anything to throw the 3060 in and use it, or will my ram bottleneck me and cause crashes or other problems?

Comments

  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 5,661
    edited February 2023

    Your relative lack of RAM will prevent you from using the card to its full extent, probably by miles.

    I found with my last machine where I had a GTX1060 (6Gb) and 16Gb RAM that I was running out of RAM first. When I upgraded to 24Gb RAM it then filled the card before running out of RAM. As for crashes. Hmm. Not really sure. I suspect if the scene was going to crash due to lack of RAM, the type of card present will not affect it.

    Do be aware that the CPU also needs to be able to feed data to the card too. I was finding my 10yo Xeon 4 core was at 25% capacity when pouring data into the GTX1060. The 3060 I have is more than 4x faster, possibly up to 8x than the 1060. So, I suspect your CPU may be a bottleneck too, and I would fear crashes from that more than I would lack of RAM.

    In your situation last year I fitted more RAM for the old machine as a temporary measure, and got the 3060 in a new machine specced so pretty much everything would bottleneck at the same time when using DS.

    Regards,

    Richard.

    Post edited by richardandtracy on
  • PerttiAPerttiA Posts: 10,024

    There has been a number of users with 16GB RAM suffering from crashes, 32GB's should be considered as minimum, whatever GPU one uses.
    Yes, Windows is supposed to use ones drivespace as an extension when running out of RAM, but often it just results in crashing the computer.

  • 3WC3WC Posts: 1,107

    I haven't had any problems with 16 up til now...

  • PerttiAPerttiA Posts: 10,024

    3WC said:

    I haven't had any problems with 16 up til now...

    Have you started a thread here with title "My DAZ is crashing all the time"?

  • 3WC3WC Posts: 1,107

    PerttiA said:

    3WC said:

    I haven't had any problems with 16 up til now...

    Have you started a thread here with title "My DAZ is crashing all the time"?

    No, not me. Everything is working great for me.

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