how much RAM should i get for my computer so many people ask the question
and the only answer they can get from the in the no techies and i mean we've
even done it here before is usually well
how much are you planning to use get that much which is only useful if
you know how much your workload requires for gamers it's relatively simple
there's a number on the back of the box excuse me a digital information page
because physical media but for content creators and our main
focus is going to be on adobe creative cloud because that's what we use here
between adobe's own system requirements and white papers and the numerous
professionals on the message boards around the web there's no solid answer
all we really hear is you need multiple fast storage locations more memory is
good uh faster processors with more cores are good and video cards with like
speed and memory capacity are good this
has been the ongoing guidance with seemingly no consideration for recent
technological changes in the shifting bottlenecks within pcs and workstations
for years so as part of the process of designing
the workstations for our editors to find the optimal cost to performance
compromise for a given workload i asked edzel to run some benchmarks in premiere
pro after effects and photoshop all the
creative cloud 2014 versions to investigate the effect of more CPU cores
more RAM up to 128 gigs and varying
storage solutions now i was half expecting scraps of paper with notes
scribbled on them so that we could configure our workstations but what i actually got was a very detailed summary
with useful charts that we'll publish separately on the Linus tech tip site in
the link in the video description for folks who want to read it but for those
of you who prefer videos well we made a video about it too so watch on oh and
mash that subscribe button if you haven't already because our x99
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click now to learn more i'll start by introducing the test bench it's edzel's
12 core xeon e5 2697 based workstation
with the same ASUS x79 deluxe motherboard that we use in all of our
editing rigs two GeForce gtx titans for accelerating 3d rendering a cooler
master 1200 watt modular power supply a kingston 240 gig SSD and a wd one
terabyte velociraptor for storage and normally 64 gigs of hyperx quad channel
RAM but to properly investigate the effects of memory on performance we
needed more RAM so we used eight 16 gig sticks of intelligent memory ecc
RAM huge thanks to memphis by the way for providing this to us for testing
giving us a whopping 128 gigs of RAM to either allocate to
programs or use as a RAM disk to see if
we could use excess memory in the system to alleviate storage bottlenecks
so our premiere pro investigation started with allocating memory to the
program via the preferences menu and rendering out projects at 1080p and 4k
resolution with x264 we used x264
because it was better optimized for multi-core processors which inherently
utilizes more memory now remember that when we allocate memory to premiere that
doesn't mean that's the amount of RAM in the system but rather how much of what's
in the system we can afford to allocate purely to premiere to play with so at
1080p we found that if you don't want to multitask on your machine while
rendering eight gigs of system memory is likely to be fine there was no benefit
to more RAM beyond our lowest tested six gig allocation at 4k though the story
changes somewhat our rad project render times improved by seven percent when we
went from six gigs to 24 gigs of allocated memory flattening out
significantly after that demonstrating that the conventional wisdom of more RAM
doesn't really help beyond a certain point continues to hold true but where
that certain point is will depend on the type of projects you're working on and
we found that our 4k prores renders benefited from up to 64 gigs of RAM on
Windows 8 but not beyond for larger
longer projects like movies you might end up needing more memory to keep
things running smoothly while editing but render times still probably won't
benefit much now since the usefulness of more RAM
falls off a cliff past 64 gigs that left us with ha another 64 gigs of RAM to
play around with in the system so we decided to see if we could utilize a RAM
disk as a scratch disk and
okay yeah uh faster storage here doesn't actually do much sort of render times
aren't improved but a separate physical drive for a scratch disk whether it's
RAM or or SSD especially SSD versus
slower hard drives does improve the overall perceived system performance
with more responsive playback faster file importing and faster project
opening being some of the most noticeable benefits moving on to after
effects our investigation changed somewhat to include both RAM allocation
and CPU core scaling since we couldn't find much information about either of
these topics RAM allocation in multi-processor rendering mode is a
particularly confusing thing because
adobe allows anywhere from one gig to six gigs with the caveat being that if
you have too many cores for the amount of RAM that you're trying to allocate
per core in your system let's say you have a quad core CPU 16 gigs of RAM and
you go and try and allocate six gigs per core to total of 24 gigs derp the
program supposedly simply won't use all
of your cores in this case and on top of that it treats logical processors or
hyper-threaded cores the same as physical ones so finding the balance
here then is key the largest performance improvement from additional RAM
allocation was going from one gig per core to two gigs per core so in theory
then we should ensure that we have at least 48 gigs of RAM for a 12 core
hyper-threaded after effects workstation but beyond that the law of diminishing
returns should hit us pretty hard but then we noticed an interesting thing
here and that was that even though our six gigs per core allocation should have
required 144 gigs of system RAM limiting
us to 19 of our 24 threads theoretically
CPU utilization still hovered around 99
even in this case so maybe hyper threaded cores really
aren't affecting performance much which led us to our investigation into CPU
cores and after effects performance we tackled this in two different ways first
by using CPU scheduling to isolate our real course validating our hypothesis
that hyper threading isn't really doing a whole lot in this case and then by
disabling cores manually within the computer's UEFI BIOS to see how
performance is affected by more actual physical cores so in that case
performance improvements from having more horses pulling the cart were
immediately noticeable and while not linear still demonstrated excellent
scaling now you might think then what is the point of the CPU scheduling setting
then why even bother with it well edsel found that reserving CPU cores even
though CPU usage by the system didn't change much prevented after effects from
being over scheduled and lagging out the system and we'll wrap things up in
photoshop where the objective was to determine how much memory we would need
for manipulating and resizing very large images on a beefy workstation like this
one and the answer is well really not a heck of a lot while four gigs of RAM
resulted in much lower performance than eight or more beyond eight gigs we
didn't observe much of a difference but bear in mind that this will greatly
depend on the size of your project and the history state setting so the project
we used took 4.75 gigs of memory or scratch disk and you know the size of
the project then of course greatly affects the memory usage of your actions
so in our case while it's not something we can easily benchmark we did find that
our SSD's performance was a bit of a bottleneck while opening projects or
performing certain actions things we would have assumed adobe would try to do
in memory first rather than relying on scratch so we did find that creating a
RAM disk as the scratch disk could improve the user experience by forcing
photoshop to write to RAM seven SSD but ultimately for raw performance it's just
going to come down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory so that
same old conclusion which i guess leads us to the rest of the conclusion
in the last few years the general guidelines lots of processing cores lots
of RAM and fast storage haven't really changed
and they didn't change but i still hope that this video for adobe creators
anyway helped to clarify which of these things might have a bigger impact on
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watching today guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought
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actually i really want to hear what you guys thought of this video it's a little bit of a departure from our from our
usual style a little bit more hardcore content creation as opposed to consumer
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