Can 32 GB RAM secure my experience?

[Shenmue-X]

Hi,

I didn't find any answer since pretty all threads about RAM are talking about speed of the game.

I'm more interested about reliability as I play with every league loaded.

From my long experience with FM 2007 and a bit 2016, crash dump generally happens when memory usage becomes tricky for FM and the OS (conflict with other applications, sensitive transition from RAM to Windows cache file).

For instance, because FM is using 90% your RAM plus some circumstances, you could save your game with lacking data, making your save corrupted and impossible to load again.

I would like to know if installing more RAM can significantly help reliability for long-term saves or is it rather useless in modern FMs?

Edited October 11, 2020 by Shenmue-X

[JordanMilly]

Nowadays, FM is 64-bit, and so is able to use more RAM. However, 8-16GB is more than enough for FM, it doesn't use a lot of RAM, and CPU processor speed is much more important for saves staying quick as they become long-term.

[Shenmue-X]

The stress point is that I use Google Chrome alongside FM. And Chrome is very RAM intensive.

I also tend to keep some FM editors opened in background so I often reach the maximal RAM usage.

So far, I didn't encounter any issue but I have yet to simulate long-term saves with +300k players.

[Brother Ben]

Frankly I doubt you'd need more than 8gb even with loads of tabs open but if you're anything like me the next rig I build will have at least 32gb as a "nice to have" and i'll probably get a 1000w power supply even though my PC will never draw more than 500w

TBH the speed and latency of your RAM is far more important especially if you're running AMD 

Edited October 11, 2020 by Brother Ben

[-Jef-]

But you didn't specify what's your system and how much ram do you have currently. If you have 4gb ram of course it's gonna be 90% usage. If it's 16GB ram I doubt FM takes 90% of that

[Shenmue-X]

@rosque

I misspoke. 90% was meant for the sum of my processes.

My desktop rig is 16GB Ram DDR3 800x2mhz

+ CPU: AMD FX8320 (2x4 cores)

Full SSD, Windows 10

FM20 is currently varying between 4,2gb and 4,7gb. I don't want to quit my other applications because I want to stress FM20 in my normal environment.

[goranm]

This screenshot doesn't have all the necessary information. Your active applications add up to approx 60% of RAM, so other 30% is used by something not reported by Task Manager. The information at the bottom the Performance-Memory tab is relevant as well, and you may have an issue there.

[Xavier Lukhas]

RAM is often an area where people look at when trying to improve their system notably because it doesn't require them to change their PC in any meaningful and especially expensive way. That being said, it won't change a thing for FM. The OS and especially Chrome may swap out things in and out of physical storage in place of RAM memory if you have too many tabs open for your system memory or your processor to handle simultaneously, but that's all. Effectively you're re-loading tabs you've left "open" but that Chrome (or any browser) figured you hadn't been to for a while and therefore tucked away, so it can feel slow if your CPU or storage aren't particularly good at it. That process can be called "swapping", "paging", or nay sort of use of virtual memory (essentially using system memory to compensate for the lack of RAM).

If you want a serious boost to your FM endeavours, I'd consider a switch in CPU... even if I would recommend against buying today (literally today) as new CPUs from AMD are going to get released soon. Or don't change if you're happy with your system otherwise, it's wasteful to change on a whim. On the topic of memory corruption, it usually isn't a problem for people who run their RAM at stock settings and don't overclock it significantly. Therefore, I wouldn't blame RAM if your FM save gets corrupted. FM is far from perfect: even the vanilla leagues can have nonsense happening in them that doesn't pan out well 20 or 30 seasons later.

TL; DR: RAM ain't dong nothing for FM performance but can make your life a bit easier. If you have crashing elsewhere with "free" RAM still available, it can be a multitude of things and RAM is one of those things.

[goranm]

If OP is planning to run the largest possible database with all leagues playable and on high detail, and have other processes like Chrome open, extra RAM will help. No matter how good the CPU is, RAM will become a bottleneck as soon as the uncompressed save size explodes beyond RAM capacity.

Edited October 12, 2020 by goranm

[Shenmue-X]

Indeed, the save size after some seasons is something that bothers me.

Currently, my stress-save has :

1 379 333 players, 556 170 staff and 224 063 teams for 730 leagues in 230 countries.

So far,I simulated only one month over two irl nights. As expected, the game is very slow.

But as I said, I don't care about speed. I just want to be sure FM is reliable enough to play with a ridiculous number of playable leagues (on mixed details) in a long-term save.

By the way, do you know when the match highlights are supposed to fade away in full detail?

I remember highlights were lost few days after the match in FM16 if you had a crazy number of leagues to simulate.

Edited October 12, 2020 by Shenmue-X

[inacion]

1 hour ago, Shenmue-X said:

Indeed, the save size after some seasons is something that bothers me.

Currently, my stress-save has :

1 379 333 players, 556 170 staff and 224 063 teams for 730 leagues in 230 countries.

So far,I simulated only one month over two irl nights. As expected, the game is very slow.

But as I said, I don't care about speed. I just want to be sure FM is reliable enough to play with a ridiculous number of playable leagues (on mixed details) in a long-term save.

By the way, do you know when the match highlights are supposed to fade away in full detail?

I remember highlights were lost few days after the match in FM16 if you had a crazy number of leagues to simulate.

If the entire database is stored in memory you will need lot of RAM memory, a SSD disk and very good CPU for initial load otherwise will be very very slow to load saved game file. If lot of thing aren't cached or only loaded or memory cached on demand then you won't need a huge amount of memory but mostly a SSD disk and good CPU.

If resources consume start with a low value and increase over the time, then is the second option the thing are only cached on demand. If the resources consume is fixed over the game play then the entire file is cached in memory. It depends how the software is developed

[EdL]

Having 32GB of ram isn't going to be any benefit to FM, it certainly won't make the game more stable, if you are getting instability you should log those crash dumps in the forums so they can be investigated

[Shenmue-X]

I ended to get a crash dump with a preventive message: "Running dangerously low on memory. Tried to allocate 764944 bytes". Forgot to screenshot the final error message but it was pretty much the same.

It coincided with the day I decide to put all my 230 nations in maximum detail instead of mixed details (70 D1s with high detail) and the moment I enter mid September in the game (i.e. the end of most of friendlies, and the start of many seasons) .

Before this time, I never got the error while my computer was regularly topping 99% RAM usage.

I will pursue my tests.

Edited October 23, 2020 by Shenmue-X

[-Jef-]

If you want to run a lot of details then you need to upgrade the CPU. That is your bottleneck. Get 16GB ram with something modern of at least 4c8t like Ryzen 3300x or intel i3 10th generation.

[Shenmue-X]

Intuitively, I was to buy 4x8 gb ddr3 ram as bottleneck workaround since it's much cheaper than buying a new motherboard + ddr4 ram + CPU.

But you're probably right as my save crashed very early in the game. I've no guaranty I'm not going to encounter the same bottleneck in late game with moderate details. That's my fear: Getting a save with so much data inside that FM can no longer load properly.

Edited October 23, 2020 by Shenmue-X

[-Jef-]

Best thing you could do is buy Ryzen 3 ready B450 board (40-50 quid), Ryzen 3300x and 16 GB 3000Mhz RAM. Or just change Ryzen for i3 10300 (i think it is this) and any cheap-o board and same ram.

[Brother Ben]

If you are going to run that much full detail then Ryzen will excel

Although nowhere near what you've done here, Benchmark C is all leagues loaded with half a dozen on full detail

I'll be honest i'm not overly sure what you're trying to achieve.  If you want to see the reliability of long term saves then pick your normal set-up and then leave it holiday for a day or two

[oche balboa]

On 12/10/2020 at 15:06, Shenmue-X said:

Indeed, the save size after some seasons is something that bothers me.

Currently, my stress-save has :

1 379 333 players, 556 170 staff and 224 063 teams for 730 leagues in 230 countries.

So far,I simulated only one month over two irl nights. As expected, the game is very slow.

But as I said, I don't care about speed. I just want to be sure FM is reliable enough to play with a ridiculous number of playable leagues (on mixed details) in a long-term save.

By the way, do you know when the match highlights are supposed to fade away in full detail?

I remember highlights were lost few days after the match in FM16 if you had a crazy number of leagues to simulate.

I've never seen anyone run that many leagues, Countries and players. Surely this is the problem in itself 

[Shenmue-X]

3 hours ago, Brother Ben said:

If you are going to run that much full detail then Ryzen will excel

Althogh nowhere near what you've done here, Benchmark C is all leagues loaded with half a dozen on full detail

I'll be honest i'm not overly sure what you're trying to achieve.  If you want to see the reliability of long term saves then pick your normal set-up and then leave it holiday for a day or two

My goal is to get the most complete possible experience in one and unique save. I will probably play this save for the many years to come, like I did with my FM 2007 save over eight years.

So I need to test an extreme pregame set-up to understand the software & hardware limits and decide how many leagues per country and how many competitions in full detail I can run eventually in my normal set-up.

Before FM turns into 64 bits, the limits were pretty clear. You couldn't run more than 40/60 countries. Modern FM's limits are more cryptic and I want to push them for science.

[Brother Ben]

1 hour ago, Shenmue-X said:

My goal is to get the most complete possible experience in one and unique save. I will probably play this save for the many years to come, like I did with my FM 2007 save over eight years.

So I need to test an extreme pregame set-up to understand the software & hardware limits and decide how many leagues per country and how many competitions in full detail I can run eventually in my normal set-up.

Before FM turns into 64 bits, the limits were pretty clear. You couldn't run more than 40/60 countries. Modern FM's limits are more cryptic and I want to push them for science.

Ok great, interesting idea.  Like I say though you'd be best off just leaving it holiday for a week or so in real time, a pain I know, and monitor the RAM usage.  To be honest I doubt that anyone can help you with this as they won't have ever done it themselves. 

There is no doubt however (in my mind) that 32gb of RAM and one of the new Ryzen 9 5950X or Ryzen 9 5900X would be best suited for this kind of thing

I applaud you for attempting this though

Edited October 23, 2020 by Brother Ben

[Shenmue-X]

Thanks lol.

That's what I'm doing actually. I'm simulating my extreme save every night since two weeks now.

However, I'm not in a hurry since I have yet to end my personal modding meanwhile.

I expect to start my definitive save in one or two weeks.

[Brother Ben]

Yeah that's the best way

What spec is you current computer?  I'm guessing you're on 4th gen Intel or lower based on the fact you mentioned DDR3.  I run a i5 4670k myself so i'd be keen to see how you get on.

I remember there was a guy who did Football Manager in real time, playing matches on the actual day in full.  I think this kind of setup would be great for that

https://realtimefm.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/introductio/

Edited October 23, 2020 by Brother Ben

[Shenmue-X]

16GB Ram DDR3 800x2mhz

CPU: AMD FX8320 (2x4 cores)

Full SSD, Windows 10

My CPU is AM3+ architecture. AMD officially released the model about 10 years ago. It can be viewed as the straight equivalent of PS4 and Xbox One's AMD Jaguar.

It's unlikely I buy a new rig as I've no money but I'm not complaining. FM20 is much more reactive and reliable than FM16 was. The 64bits transition is truly a huge step forward.

Edited October 23, 2020 by Shenmue-X

[Brother Ben]

I'm guessing its going to be really slow going but worth it in the hunt for realism

[Shenmue-X]

I didn't know him but RealTimeFM's style of play is very close of mine.

I usually play a match in full 90 minutes (in fact 50-60 minutes since FM is accelerating the time over little timeouts like throw-in or corners). That means I play very few matches per week irl so I can afford long time loading.

By targeting a huge database, I'm looking for several things:

- Less grey players as possible to make scouting more exciting and international competitions more interesting. If a player leaves your club because he gets too old or if you loan him, it's always a satisfaction to see what he's really doing in lower divisions or in a more modest country.

- I'm fascinated by exotism in football so having the whenever possibility to play or follow football of Bhutan, Micronesia, Botswana, Monaco, Vatican or Greenland is a dream coming true. Same can be said for lower divisions. Imagine a TV channel where you can watch every match in the world. FM is a fascinating world-in-the-world simulator.

- I hate starting a new save to play a new country or league. I prefer long-term save because you can continue a long mythology of stories, newgen players and eventually legends, made by yourself or the AI. Very few games manage to convey this kind of joy apart some strategy games and RPG Dwarf Fortress.

That's really the way I wish to play FM now and definitely excited to start.

 

 

[Welshace]

I run similar database sizes on a system with 16gb ram.. and like you, have various other tasks running alongside....  ram has never been the bottleneck.. 

 

Your CPU on the otherhand certainly is...

[Brother Ben]

13 minutes ago, Shenmue-X said:

I didn't know him but RealTimeFM's style of play is very close of mine.

I usually play a match in full 90 minutes (in fact 50-60 minutes since FM is accelerating the time over little timeouts like throw-in or corners). That means I play very few matches per week irl so I can afford long time loading.

By targeting a huge database, I'm looking for several things:

- Less grey players as possible to make scouting more exciting and international competitions more interesting. If a player leaves your club because he gets too old or if you loan him, it's always a satisfaction to see what he's really doing in lower divisions or in a more modest country.

- I'm fascinated by exotism in football so having the whenever possibility to play or follow football of Bhutan, Micronesia, Botswana, Monaco, Vatican or Greenland is a dream coming true. Same can be said for lower divisions. Imagine a TV channel where you can watch every match in the world. FM is a fascinating world-in-the-world simulator.

- I hate starting a new save to play a new country or league. I prefer long-term save because you can continue a long mythology of stories, newgen players and eventually legends, made by yourself or the AI. Very few games manage to convey this kind of joy apart some strategy games and RPG Dwarf Fortress.

That's really the way I wish to play FM now and definitely excited to start.

 

 

Sounds like a great way to play the game it really does.  Where are you looking to start?  

This might be a bit of an ask but do you have a list of the leagues you are going to load?

Are you loading all players from all continents too?

[Shenmue-X]

I plan to make active and playable every D3 of my 230 nations. D8 loaded for France (my country) and Uncle Sam's USA D6 (I'm personally intrigued by its pyramid).

With all its leagues loaded, I expect France to have some advantage in newgen production so I hope to set D4 for the 16 most important nations to counterbalance but Argentina (D4 in Argentina means 3000 teams more to simulate... France until D8 groups only 2000 teams).

I might reduce modest nations to only D2 or D1 according the performance of my tests.

Here's the list of the editor data files I plan to load:

https://textup.fr/495429pW

I will likely chose to start controlling the club of my own town, in French D8.

  

22 minutes ago, Brother Ben said:

Are you loading all players from all continents too?

As I'm going to load every D3 on the globe, all the pre-existing players in the database are automatically loaded, that means about 300k players.

With newgen and youth intake dates, I expect this figure to reach 2 million players after some seasons but it's only a prediction.

Edited October 23, 2020 by Shenmue-X

[Brother Ben]

Very ambitious and fascinating.  I hope you find time to write about your career on these forums

[Etebaer]

If you have already a PC with 16GB and no room to expand simply stay with it until you buy a new one.

Any new PC that is build to last more than 2 years should go with 32GB Ram as 16 becomes the new minimum spec.

It wont help to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB in FM20 and if it helps in future FMs is up to how SI handles it.

 

I have recently upgraded from a FX8350 + 16GB DDR3 1600 to a Ryzen 3600 + 32GB DDR4 3600 and the impact and performance gain is HUGE - but not in FM.

In FM it runs almost as slow as the on the old CPU - i am not fully sure why, maybe the CPU was never the bottleneck in that game - i simply did not dig into the case.

 

 

PS: Maybe i should make it more clear that i do not speak about FPS in the 3D Match - i speak about processing time, especially between the games that are as slow as they allways were and this is the part were i would want way more performance improvement!

Also if you work with the ingame Scouting Software Packages it becomes insanely slow in response with at times it may take several seconds to respond (i do not speak about seaching with filters but the responsiveness when that is done).

It seems to me that is not run on RAM but the Data Drive.

Edited October 24, 2020 by Etebaer

[oche balboa]

On 23/10/2020 at 16:15, Shenmue-X said:

I plan to make active and playable every D3 of my 230 nations. D8 loaded for France (my country) and Uncle Sam's USA D6 (I'm personally intrigued by its pyramid).

With all its leagues loaded, I expect France to have some advantage in newgen production so I hope to set D4 for the 16 most important nations to counterbalance but Argentina (D4 in Argentina means 3000 teams more to simulate... France until D8 groups only 2000 teams).

I might reduce modest nations to only D2 or D1 according the performance of my tests.

Here's the list of the editor data files I plan to load:

https://textup.fr/495429pW

I will likely chose to start controlling the club of my own town, in French D8.

  

As I'm going to load every D3 on the globe, all the pre-existing players in the database are automatically loaded, that means about 300k players.

With newgen and youth intake dates, I expect this figure to reach 2 million players after some seasons but it's only a prediction.

This is mad but brilliant and i hope you do a story/career about it 

[TioPatinhax]

How is this going? Has the game crashed?

[Shenmue-X]

1 hour ago, TioPatinhax said:

How is this going? Has the game crashed?

I didn't progress enough in my main save as I was busy over the last months.

But all my stress tests have been successful before, even with 100 opened tabs on Google Chrome. I just needed to tweak some mods to get them right together. So I'm very confident it will work long-term.

I noticed one limit, the France pyramid. The more you load teams in the database, the more the regionalisation might be buggy when a team is promoted or relegated to a regional league.

However, someone has found a design solution to get 100% ratio success but you need to re-write the mod completely.

As an interesting note, the mod creator of the France pyramid said he wanted to add the remaining lower divisions but the modern PCs are not enough powerful to load such amount of data.

[Nahuelzn]

This thread is great for me as I always plays with (what I consider) a lot of leagues, and for FM22 I want to do a journeyman save starting in the lowest of African football, which means I want to load at least 30 countries in Africa, plus 15 in Asia, 15 or 20 in America  (CONCACAF and CONMEBOL), and 15 or 20 in Europe. Which for me seems a lot. My worry isn't performance (FM21 with my pc runs fine) nor time, I don't want a corrupted save over the years.

@Shenmue-X, in your stress tests, did you ever encounter a corrupted save game after the huge file that you initially tried to simulate?

 

[Shenmue-X]

@Nahuelzn

I did have one corrupted save just after having generated my game (without progressing the calendar). I think I fixed it by cancelling some edits in my Vatican & Monaco mods. Very weird bug btw.

Apart that one, I don't think I had ever corrupted saves. Every issues I had are because I run mods from different authors so I fixed them in FM Editor.

Unfortunately, the game is too slow to achieve realistic tests. You have to set the game at minimal details to stress the long-term capability.

The most important thing in testing is to pass 2022 because of the tricky World Cup in Qatar. This is where the challenge is generally about.

Edited September 29, 2021 by Shenmue-X

[TioPatinhax]

Is it possible with only 16GB RAM to also run a very big number leagues (for example, all the leagues that come with the game) at a speed where you can play and you can still use Chrome at the same time for example?

 

Thank you

[FrazT]

2 hours ago, TioPatinhax said:

Is it possible with only 16GB RAM to also run a very big number leagues (for example, all the leagues that come with the game) at a speed where you can play and you can still use Chrome at the same time for example?

 

Thank you

The processor is more critical than the amount of RAM if you want processing speed- 16GB RAM is perfectly acceptable for any sort of game set up

[TioPatinhax]

1 minuto atrás, FrazT disse:

The processor is more critical than the amount of RAM if you want processing speed- 16GB RAM is perfectly acceptable for any sort of game set up

Thank you FrazzT. So that means my PC wont come to a screeching halt with 16GB RAM even if I run all the leagues of the game (putting aside the processing speed of FM)?

[FrazT]

7 minutes ago, TioPatinhax said:

Thank you FrazzT. So that means my PC wont come to a screeching halt with 16GB RAM even if I run all the leagues of the game (putting aside the processing speed of FM)?

The only time that there can be problems is when the save game gets to "enormous" size and the machine just gives up without anyone really having any idea why this happens.  The amount of RAM is not thought to  be a contributing factor if this happens.  16GB will be fine

I would, however, ask you to consider whether it is worth loading all the leagues in the game when 98% will be unused and you can run the risk of a crash in a long term save?

[DarJ]

14 minutes ago, TioPatinhax said:

So that means my PC wont come to a screeching halt with 16GB RAM even if I run all the leagues of the game (putting aside the processing speed of FM)?

I have all leagues loaded (some are view only) and my save file is about 500mb and my laptop has 16GB of ram and you can absolutely run the game fine 

 

 

[TioPatinhax]

2 minutos atrás, DarJ disse:

I have all leagues loaded (some are view only) and my save file is about 500mb and my laptop has 16GB of ram and you can absolutely run the game fine 

 

 

Thanks! Can you at the same time also use programs like Chrome and watch youtube videos for example?

[DarJ]

14 minutes ago, TioPatinhax said:

Thanks! Can you at the same time also use programs like Chrome and watch youtube videos for example?

I have 4 videos playing in the background in 4K, 20 chrome tabs open and FM on holiday mode, the CPU is at 100% usage and I still don't use up to 90% of the ram

Edited September 30, 2021 by DarJ

[DarJ]

I had an issue yesterday tho where In updated my display driver and "desktop windows manager" started taking up a lot of the ram and it got to almost100% usage so I had to downgrade the driver and now everything works again. So every now and then just check to see if everything is working as it should be after an update

[TioPatinhax]

9 minutos atrás, DarJ disse:

I have 4 videos playing in the background in 4K, 20 chrome tabs open and FM on holiday mode, the CPU is at 100% usage and I still don't use up to 90% of the ram

Wow, very impressive. You must also have a super CPU

[DarJ]

4 minutes ago, TioPatinhax said:

You must also have a super CPU

It's the 9th gen mobile i7

[TioPatinhax]

Em 30/09/2021 em 12:50, DarJ disse:

I have 4 videos playing in the background in 4K, 20 chrome tabs open and FM on holiday mode, the CPU is at 100% usage and I still don't use up to 90% of the ram

How does the game play in 3D, during a match? Does it stutter ?

[DarJ]

25 minutes ago, TioPatinhax said:

How does the game play in 3D, during a match? Does it stutter ?

Nope,  plays fine