Extra Drive, and Virtual memory.

FavouriteBroom · Nov 11, 2013

I have 3 drives, C: which holds all the pc's main files. It is 1 terabyte but with system info and such it is 800 GB I have a E: Drive for recovery But my D drive is completely unused except for 168 MB I want more virtual memory. And was wondering if using the whole D drive for virtual memory would be a good idea? It is 97 GB and some of my games do not have enough virtual memory with the 8GB of Virtual memory I have available.

Supahos · Nov 11, 2013

If you're using virtual memory in a game then that game is running horribly slow. Your best best is to get more memory if you're running out of physical memory. There is no need for any virtual memory if you have enough physical.

FavouriteBroom · Nov 13, 2013

Supahos :

The pc has 8 GB of Ram. This particular game requires more virtual ram. But Also I have a whole 97 GB hard drive unused and it is not back up. So 3 hard drives. First 800 GB half full. The virtual memory is there, and it is 8 GB Second drive is 97 GB empty. And last one is back up and recovery.

PassMark · Nov 14, 2013

I think you are confusing virtual memory and the paging file.

Virtual memory is a technique that virtualise the memory addresses in a computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

By contrast, the paging file extends your physical address space from the physical RAM into the hard drive. But with 8GB already, you don't need to extend it further. So there is no point making your paging file larger.

Most games are 32bit applications. All 32bit applications are given exactly 4GB of virtual address space. This is true even when running 64bit hardware and still true even if you have for example only 1GB of physical RAM. Out of the 4GB of virtual address space your game has, 2GB is reserved for the operating system. So in fact your poor old 32bit game only has 2GB of RAM to play with. See,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#memory_limits

Making a bigger paging file will have zero impact on the 2GB limit.

Typically 32bit applications run into problems after they have been running for a while. After allocating and deallocating a lot of RAM their 2GB of address space starts to fragment. So when a big block of free RAM is requested there is no fragment large enough to satisfy the request and you get an error about running out of virtual memory.

Typical solutions are,
- Beg the developer to release a 64bit version of the game.
- Beg the developer to use "PAE". This is a complex hack to get around the limit.
- Beg the developer to write better more efficient code that doesn't use as much virtual memory.
- Use the "/3GB switch" to get 3GB instead of 2GB. But this also only works if the developer makes some changes to the game as well.

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Extra Drive, and Virtual memory.

FavouriteBroom

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PassMark

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