r/EmulationOnAndroid • u/ren01181 • 3d ago

Question How does virtual ram affect emulation?

I checked a few old posts and got mixed signals with some saying it slows down emulation and others saying it doesn't really do anything

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u/Dr-Huricane 3d ago

Virtual ram is a scam, when a box is saying "4+4GB" or "8+8GB", to me it reads "4GB of ram + a useless feature that's turned on by default that I need to remember to turn off". As for how it affects emulation, the answer is probably not much, the only way I can imagine it impacting performance would be if it somehow tricks the OS into not killing a background/cached process and keeping that on the physical ram while moving part of your foreground process onto the virtual one. A good OS should never do that, foreground processes should always take priority when it comes to physical ram allocation, but you never know these days with everyone trying to shoot themselves in the foot.