Comments

Rednroll wrote on 4/9/2004, 9:27 AM
Yes,
The more RAM you have the better, especially for plugin count. I use to run into plugin bog down issues when I had 256Meg or RAM. Now, I'm running 1.1Gig of RAM with no problems.
risenwithhim wrote on 4/9/2004, 10:45 AM
You rock buddy. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

Anybody else have any wisdom to add?
cosmo wrote on 4/9/2004, 11:11 AM
I'll second that. I have 3/4G RAM on my P4 2.4 and it handles loads of plugins.
zemlin wrote on 4/9/2004, 12:17 PM
Open your task manager and click on the PERFORMANCE tap. Watch RAM load while you are working, playing, rendering, etc. If you don't approach the limit of your RAM, then adding more won't help. If you RAM usage goes to or beyond the physical memory you have installed them more RAM will help. I'd be surprised if adding more than 1GB would offer any benefit.
vanblah wrote on 4/9/2004, 5:26 PM
Hey cosmo,

Do you mean you have three fourths of a GB of RAM or 3 to 4 GB of RAM?

If you have 3 to 4 GB of RAM are you using the /3GB switch in Windows XP (in boot.ini)? If you are, can you tell me if you've had any instabilities?

Doug
risenwithhim wrote on 4/10/2004, 6:28 AM
I stuck another 512 in it. So I have 4 sticks of 256, for a total 1gb. 145 bucks later, programs load faster, but I don't know if it made a huge difference in playback. I'm using quantum-fx, and using several instances of it just kills my playback. I wish they'd update it or something.

I'm told Waves is the bomb. Is it pretty processor-intensive, or not?
drbam wrote on 4/10/2004, 7:55 AM
The recent versions of Waves are less CPU intensive than pre-3.5. However all plugs are different, ie; obviously a verb is going to use a LOT more ram than an eq. If you are using several instances of something that's a hog, try using it as a buss efx and/or render some processed tracks (apply non-realtime efx).

drbam
cosmo wrote on 4/12/2004, 7:21 AM
3/4 as in 512 + 256 = 768MB RAM. I use lots of waves plugs but not with Vegas too much. I use them with Cubase...I get lots more tracks in Cubase than Vegas. I Vegas I have the same problems as risenwithhim but not wuite as bad. I just can't stack up tracks like I can in other apps.
PipelineAudio wrote on 4/12/2004, 10:50 AM
Glad to see someone else say it. Vegas 4, sound forge 6 and 7, just never had the rock solid performance of vegas 3 and sound forge 5. Theres glitchiness, and stickiness/sketchiness, (all technical terms,) and instabilities, that make life rather more difficult now
imac wrote on 4/15/2004, 4:50 PM
512 is a minimum, any more is a waste of money that will not be used
(for tracks and plugins)

If using Samplers and VSTi's that is a different issue

What really will give you that last measurable performance increase (in terms of RAM) is the speed of the RAM, ie latency etc, not FSB speed

Get RAM that has ultra low latency and is reviewed to be good overclocked, and then pull it down a little further in your bios


Bottom line is how fast the CPU can deal with all this, is the limiting factor.
This is a better value-performance upgrade than RAM for you as you have 512 already.
Swap your CPU with whatever the MB can handle. It's a very cost effective upgrade considering the time wasted working around an overloaded system

When you are getting to that stage in your mix start raising the asio buffer into the thousands to get that little bit more...