possibly silly question: how much RAM is enough

If you have a CUDA card in your machine..will there be a need for so much more ram than 16gb-24gb if your doing RAM previews?
 
I have two systems. One has 16 Gigs. The other 24Gigs. Same processor (I7 960). I work in Premiere CS5 and After Effects CS5. Do I see any performance difference? NO. Do I see any stability difference? No. Is rendering any faster on one? NO. Conclusion: Anything over 16 Gigabytes is unecessary. 96 Gigabytes is not only a total overkill, it is simply insane.

However, with more RAM, do you notice when working with PP and AE that things seem snappier? In other words, do you see PP and AE take advantage of the additional RAM by storing working data?

I'm guessing it may not result in any performance boost, but will allow your system to run more snappier with less stalls.
 
Bottom line question is... who here uses MORE than 32GB of RAM (i.e. 48GB, 64GB, 96GB, 128GB....), can you give us some anecdotal evidence that more RAM is better?

Whether it is overall speed of rendering or a snappier experience.
 
From Adobe's Todd Kopriva:

Decoding data uses CPU
Rendering image from inputs RAM, CPU, GPU
Encoding data CPU

"12GB will let you work smoothly without problems due to not having enough RAM.

For optimal performance, 24GB or even more is recommended."

And when discussing AE, he recommended 4GB/core.

No mention of snappiness...


http://www.video2brain.com/en/videos-5351.htm
 
Would there be a significant difference in rendering time and overall performance between a quad core 4Gb of ram system and an 8 core 16Gb of ram system?
 
4 Gigabytes is basic. 8 Gigabytes is perfect. 16 Gigabytes is more than perfect. 24 Gigabytes is unecessary. Anything over is insane.

i think that little RAM in a program as hungry for RAM as Premiere CS4 and 5.5 seems to be, is in my experience unworkable. I have 24GB and my machine rips right through most everything I can throw at it, save DSLR footage for some reason.

Maybe I could get by with a little less, though I am certain that would cost me in performance if I go much below that. Certainly I am not willing to consider anything less than 16 or 18. RAM is so cheap now, its better to have a little extra as opposed to not have enough.
 
I have done an ok amount of AE work with mostly PPro editing. I recently upgraded from 16gb to 32gb and larger projects use to take a good amount of time to even open let alone playback compared to smaller projects before the upgrade. Adobe would fill up the 16gb no problem once opened, but now I don't seem to peek above 22gb very often. Once you add in dynamic linked clips and other goodies, I still don't get much of a hiccup.
Specs:
i7-2600k@4.0GHz
Intel 120gb SSD (noticed the biggest overall performance upgrade)
32gb RAM
GTX 470
 
Fundamentally memory is about holding data in a very fast access area as opposed to having to return to disk. If the system can have the whole clip in memory it theoretically should perform faster. Is the software written to take advantage of that... I dunno. There is however no such thing as too much, but there are certainly diminishing returns.
 
im running a hackintosh (osx lion) with i7 2600 overclocked to 3.8ghz. a GTX 460II with cuda enabled, solid state hd and 32gb of 1600mhz ram. when originally set up the hackintosh didnt like the 32gb of ram so i was running with just 1 8gb stick in there. my mate optimised it all and now the 32gb is stable. but there is no difference in performance between the 8gb and the 32gb. The cuda hardware accelleration makes extra ram null and void i guess? Just means I can run more software in the background with the extra.
 
The linear thinking, "the more the better" doesn't work here. I suggest checking this topic:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/734343?tstart=0

The effectiveness of AE memory usage is a really comlpex and complicated matter and depends on many parameters like how many cores your CPU has, whether you use hyperthreading or not, how much memory you assign to each core etc. In some situations it boosts performance, in others it slows it down.
 
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