Memory+Page file+Game Load times.

[kinzerykyk]

Say you have 2 gigs of good ram. And you decrease the HD disk page file to 0..will your game load faster because it's forced to load from ram instead of hd? Will games overall run faster? Can anyone try it with say BF2?

Thanks!

 

[The_Prophecy]

With BF2, you won't be able to get away with no paging file. BF2 just sucks too much ram.... for other games though, it might be possible. I don't recommend not using a paging file though because some programs require that one be present in order to work properly.

 

[kinzerykyk]

are you sure? I mean I'd think 2gb would be sufficient to run BF2, including most other games. It would be interesting to see if there's a perfomance increase.

 

[bumblebee13]

I once read a monster Windows XP tweeking guide (was about 150 pages!) and one part naturally was on page-file size and whilst i can't remember everything that was said in it, i do definitly remember that the guide stated that you should not even consider not having a page-file as it will only decrease performance, not increase it...

 

[The_Prophecy]

Many people say having 2GB really benefits BF2, because it's a ram hog..... kind of like Norton branded products.

 

[uber_g]

Many people say having 2GB really benefits BF2, because it's a ram hog.....

Ohh it Does

but it s all good , with 1gb or RAM the game was super Choppy

 

[iLLz]

I can tell you that 2 GB of RAM will benefit BF2 alot. Especially when loading games. Not so much on load time, but when after it completes the level load, when it verifies client data or whatever it says. With 2 GB RAM that part goes by twice as fast.

Also, I run my system with 2GB of ram and NO PageFile. I never have any problems. System is very snappy becuase I never have to read from pagefile on my harddrive.

I can't say however if BF2 runs faster without a pagefile or with it, but the extra ram helps.

 

[soccer7man]

Bumblebee is correct.
Here is that pdf if anyone wishes to read what the author actually wrote.
http://www.tweakguides.com/files/TGTC_XP_4.3.zip

He says it does seem logically that no pagefile would 'force' Windows to use RAM exclusively, but having researched it he found that the way XP uses the pagefile just doesn't support this theory at all, and actually it could hurt performance. The best thing to do with the page file is to put it on another separate disk (physically separate, as in get another hard drive, not just create a partition), at the beginning. What I do is create a <whatever size my pagefile is> partition at the beginning of the 2nd drive, that way the pagefile can't accidentaly get moved farther back (where the speed of the hard drive spindles is slower. This way Windows has full access to do whatever it does to the pagefile while game and OS files are being accessed from the other drive.