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Leftos
Posts: 1159
Location: Patras, Greece
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 Posted: Sun, 24th Jan 2010 18:44 Post subject: Faster HDD + no pagefile = No stuttering? |
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Since moving up to a 22 widescreen with a native 1920x1080 resolution on my current rig, some of my smooth running games have had some stuttering, which I expected.
However, yesterday, I moved some of the heaviest games to a new HDD (a Western Digital 640GB SATA2 Caviar Black, with Caviar Black being their high performance series), and have reduced the pagefile to a mere 200MB (for BSOD memory dumps) on the system disk.
First game I tried, NBA 2k10. I've never had such smooth gameplay in my life. I mean at first I thought something was wrong, that maybe the game (animations and all) was running faster than it should. But it's just that I'm having a steady 60fps!
Second game? GTA4. The stuttering made it a bad experience since I scaled up on the resolution with the same hardware. Now? Almost no stuttering, and I'm really tempted to even up the graphics due to the framerate at times climbing above 60!
So, what do you think did it? The faster HDD? The really small pagefile?
Is 2GB a safe RAM size for most games of today while having a small pagefile? Or should I create a 2GB one on the new, faster HDD?
[ i5 2500K (@4.2GHz) / GIGABYTE Z77MX-D3H / 8GB Corsair XMS / GIGABYTE GTX460 1GB OC / 640+750 GB WD Caviar Black ]
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| Posted: Sun, 24th Jan 2010 19:15 Post subject: |
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you still need pagefile for some software
besides, if you have enough memory, windows will never allocate pagefile space for memory
it's a 'just in case' invention to begin with
2GB would be enough only for low end computing at this point
at today's memory prices there's no reason to upgrade to atleast 4GB
gta4 stuttering is almost entirely a cpu speed issue i think
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| Posted: Tue, 26th Jan 2010 01:55 Post subject: |
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Some software can't operate in memory only mode and require a pagefile for swapping. Yeah stupid but that's how it is, especially since memory has gotten dirt cheap and people move to the x64 platform.
The only other way to get around it is to use a SSD. You could also consider making some of your ram a virtual drive(if you have more than 4gb, I'd suggest at least 8gb if you're going to do that), and setting your page file to it.
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Leftos
Posts: 1159
Location: Patras, Greece
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| Posted: Tue, 26th Jan 2010 13:02 Post subject: |
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I'm currently using 2GB, and don't have any plans on upgrading my RAM due to current luck of funds, so I can't really use your idea right now, but it'll be useful once I do.
I use Windows 7 for everything but gaming, and I only have the no pagefile setting on Windows XP, which I use for games. So far, GTA4, NBA 2K10 and Mass Effect haven't complained about lack of memory. Windows 7 is a different story, and there I think I'm going to keep the pagefile, mostly because I usually keep a Virtual Machine on, and several programming IDEs and browsers at the same time etc.
Peak memory usage on Windows XP (after playing some NBA 2K10 and Mass Effect) was 1620072 out of 2143320, which means that even under the heaviest use while gaming, I still had 500MB of RAM free.
Maybe gaming doesn't require that much RAM yet in order to force me to upgrade, or at least the games I play, who knows? I know I could improve my programming experience with a RAM upgrade, but there a bit of "stuttering" is acceptable ( ), so I think I'm going to keep the 2GB until games require me to upgrade.
[ i5 2500K (@4.2GHz) / GIGABYTE Z77MX-D3H / 8GB Corsair XMS / GIGABYTE GTX460 1GB OC / 640+750 GB WD Caviar Black ]
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