Secondly, the 2GB (or 3GB if enabled) per process limit is for the
processes
*virtual* address space. It has little to do with the physical RAM in the
computer.

Yes.

It's true that any individual process still won't be able to
access all 3GB or 4GB of RAM if that's what you have installed; they will
be limited to 2GB.

Which is what I said.

But a) in reality no process is ever going to be using a
full 2GB of *physical* RAM even if they have completely allocated their
2GB quota of *virtual* memory,
and b) the full amount of physical RAM is usable by all the processes
combined.

Naturally, that's my point.

But the fact is that having
more physical RAM can always provide a benefit, assuming you've got enough
processes to take advantage of it.

Right, assuming we have enough processes, but we are talking about a PC
doing little else but running MSFSX. I think I made the mistake of writing
as if I was talking about the general case, but really was talking about
dedicated MSFSX-gaming.

You don't even need all of those
processes to be memory hungry. You just need enough other processes
competing with one memory hungry process (and Windows certainly has plenty
of other processes)...lower-footprint processes can all share what's left
over after the memory hungry process gets its chunk.

If all you're doing is running MSFSX, most of the windows-process-forest can
be paged out. More than 2GB/3GB of RAM will then not give you a much faster
MSFSX, it becomes a case of rapidly diminishing returns.

Sure, the one process that the game is in
doesn't get to directly take advantage of the extra CPUs, but because of
the extra CPU all the other processes on the computer don't wind up
competing with the game for one of the CPUs, and the game can still run
somewhat faster.

Again, if all you're doing is running the game, the extra core will gain you
very little, because the rest isn't doing much. The second core will be
pretty bored. As soon as you're doing something else on the side, yes, I
agree wholheartedly, especially because the cache of the MSFSX-CPU stays
hot, but we are talking about a dedicated MSFSX-machine here.

Anno.