ethomaz said:
Devs do some tricks to use low RAM like dymanic and constant load of the scenario to the RAM while you walk... they just load a part of the scenario and you go ahead it discart the previous and load a new part... this sometimes causes screen tearing because the load is not fast enough. Load all the scenario to the RAM is the best way when you have RAM available. |
Right. BTW not always RAM usage optimization is equivalent to higher performances, for example loop unfolding consumes more memory but increases performances. On top of this "optimization"can mean a quite broad range of things: if you have to multitask many processes, even more in a multiuser environment, you'll want to minimize both RAM usage and disk access, even sacrificing some performances to obtain this, but in a single user machine, even more on a gaming console, with one privileged application that receives most of the RAM, unless the application is small enough to occupy less than the maximum available, you'll want to use ALL the RAM reserved to it to minimize disk access, that is several orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Obviously this doesn't mean wasting that RAM, but trying to use it all in the most efficient way possible, while if possible not exceeding its size.
Morrowind used a dynamic loading that had to fit in the narrow constraints of XB's 64MB RAM (what's worse that 64MB was a half of the originally planned 128MB, this caused further troubles to devs that had start planning their games before), this made the game not fully exploiting larger RAM when running on PCs: for example it was possible to extend the visibility radius, but beyond a given distance the world remained "frozen" until the player got closer. Gothic, from the same period, but PC exclusive, ran smoother and allowed continuity between indoors and outdoors.
