Vista - Battlefield 2: Swapping extreme

Hi there,

regarding to the frame rate BF2 runs fine here, but it swaps like death...
any idea what could be the problem? It occurs no matter if the session is a
"fresh" one (reboot before playing) or not, even without any other programs
running. My System is a A64 4000+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, what should be enough,
especially because friends with similar systems don't have this swapping
problems. So... any hints/tweaks/known issues?

Greets,

Arne

Yip im getting this as well with BF2 and BF2142,
got 2Gigglybits of RAM as well, im thinking 2Gig aint enough
have a gander at this webpage, tips for reducing BF2 mem used, gonna try it
out
http://www.tweakguides.com/BF2_1.html


"Arne-Kolja Bachstein" <a_k_b@web.de> wrote in message
news:EBF866C2-24F4-4A2B-BFD7-270316C7BFFA@microsoft.com...
> Hi there,
>
> regarding to the frame rate BF2 runs fine here, but it swaps like death...
> any idea what could be the problem? It occurs no matter if the session is
> a "fresh" one (reboot before playing) or not, even without any other
> programs running. My System is a A64 4000+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, what should
> be enough, especially because friends with similar systems don't have this
> swapping problems. So... any hints/tweaks/known issues?
>
> Greets,
>
> Arne

I'll have to go back and play some more BF2. I have 2GB of ram, and the G15
keyboard which allows me to see CPU and memory usage while playing. And the
most I've seen BF2 and BF2142 uses was around 75-80%, which is a bit high,
but still leaves me with about 512mb free. But I also did notice that if I
run less than a 768mb pagefile, that after a certain amount of time, BF2142
will crash and I'll get a Low virtual memory error.. Under XP, I run just a
256MB pagefile and have never gotten a low VM error.


"Arne-Kolja Bachstein" <a_k_b@web.de> wrote in message
news:EBF866C2-24F4-4A2B-BFD7-270316C7BFFA@microsoft.com...
> Hi there,
>
> regarding to the frame rate BF2 runs fine here, but it swaps like death...
> any idea what could be the problem? It occurs no matter if the session is
> a "fresh" one (reboot before playing) or not, even without any other
> programs running. My System is a A64 4000+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, what should
> be enough, especially because friends with similar systems don't have this
> swapping problems. So... any hints/tweaks/known issues?
>
> Greets,
>
> Arne

My G15 is showing 75-85% when playing BF2142, pretty much the same amount in
XP
Still seems to be alot disk activity, like alot of swapping.
game runs smooth, but once the disk activity kicks in the game starts to lag
going to try a few other games to see if the same happens

"Arne-Kolja Bachstein" <a_k_b@web.de> wrote in message
news:EBF866C2-24F4-4A2B-BFD7-270316C7BFFA@microsoft.com...
> Hi there,
>
> regarding to the frame rate BF2 runs fine here, but it swaps like death...
> any idea what could be the problem? It occurs no matter if the session is
> a "fresh" one (reboot before playing) or not, even without any other
> programs running. My System is a A64 4000+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, what should
> be enough, especially because friends with similar systems don't have this
> swapping problems. So... any hints/tweaks/known issues?
>
> Greets,
>
> Arne

Here some information about BF2, BF2142, I just upgraded to 4GB ram on
Vista64, I have the multimeter gadget that shows the cores and memory usage.
When I run BF2142 I use 48 percent of my ram, when I run BF2 I use 54
percent of me ram. I do have NIS 2007 installed and a total of 6 gadgets,
but I havent really installed much else. Fear plays great though...

System is a E6600 with 4GB ram

M.B.


"Arne-Kolja Bachstein" <a_k_b@web.de> wrote in message
news:EBF866C2-24F4-4A2B-BFD7-270316C7BFFA@microsoft.com...
> Hi there,
>
> regarding to the frame rate BF2 runs fine here, but it swaps like death...
> any idea what could be the problem? It occurs no matter if the session is
> a "fresh" one (reboot before playing) or not, even without any other
> programs running. My System is a A64 4000+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, what should
> be enough, especially because friends with similar systems don't have this
> swapping problems. So... any hints/tweaks/known issues?
>
> Greets,
>
> Arne

You never mentioned if going up to 4 gig of ram improved the performance?

Just a follow up. I ran BF2 and actually watched and I did noticed a fair
amount of disk activitiy. I'm guessing it hadn't hurt my performance too
much, because I have it on a fast sata drive, seperate from my system disk.
I am a bit surprise, since I was only using 62% of 2GB of memory, on why
Vista felt the need to hit the pagefile so much.

Maybe Microsoft is planing on buy Seagate or some other companies, because
if my my hard drive stats active the whole time I'm playing games, I'll
probably kill hard drives faster than ever.

I did set my pagefile to 0 and the game ran and I didn't get the Virtual
memory errors I got with BF2142, but I did notice little video hiccups that
I wasn't getting before. Of course, this is where there is that part of me
that says, leave vista lone until Crysis comes out as there are just to many
little annoyance with it, but then where is the fun in that ?


"Dale White" <dale.white@NOinsightbb.NOcom> wrote in message
news:VpqdnTI1n6YWQUzYnZ2dnUVZ_vyunZ2d@newedgenetworks.com...
>
> I'll have to go back and play some more BF2. I have 2GB of ram, and the
> G15 keyboard which allows me to see CPU and memory usage while playing.
> And the most I've seen BF2 and BF2142 uses was around 75-80%, which is a
> bit high, but still leaves me with about 512mb free. But I also did notice
> that if I run less than a 768mb pagefile, that after a certain amount of
> time, BF2142 will crash and I'll get a Low virtual memory error.. Under
> XP, I run just a 256MB pagefile and have never gotten a low VM error.
>
>
> "Arne-Kolja Bachstein" <a_k_b@web.de> wrote in message
> news:EBF866C2-24F4-4A2B-BFD7-270316C7BFFA@microsoft.com...
>> Hi there,
>>
>> regarding to the frame rate BF2 runs fine here, but it swaps like
>> death... any idea what could be the problem? It occurs no matter if the
>> session is a "fresh" one (reboot before playing) or not, even without any
>> other programs running. My System is a A64 4000+ with 2 Gigs of RAM, what
>> should be enough, especially because friends with similar systems don't
>> have this swapping problems. So... any hints/tweaks/known issues?
>>
>> Greets,
>>
>> Arne
>
>

Hi and thanks for all your responses.

After reading all this there seems to be the swap file and the partition the
game is installed to as a speed factor. I noticed that my swap file is
located on an other partition at the same drive, so I'll try if it helps to
move the swap file to the second drive. Don't know why, but must have been a
mistake when setting up the system. Thank you for pointing me to this, my,
fault.

Do you have some experiences with the right size of the swap file? At the
moment I would set it to 3gb fixed size, as my system has 2 gigs of ram and
I think this will be a good choice. But if you can tell me about (Vista
based) empirically better sizes please tell me. :-)

Greetings,

Arne

Well, the right size seems to be a little different under Vista than under
XP. Under XP, I could and did run without swapfile whatsoever, this was back
when I only had 1GB of ram. Then I went to 2GB. It wasn't until I came
across the game Company of Hero that told me I had to have at least 768MB of
Virtual memory in order to run. At least that's what it said at the install
screen and I never went back to see if I could play it without the VM.

Personally, I don't think the majority of people who have over 1GB of ram,
really need a pagefile 1.5x the size of RAM a 3GB pagefile is just
ridiculous. Except for the heavy hitters doing 3D cad work or maybe Movie
work, I can't see how anyone is using 5GB of ram (2GB ram + 3GB Pagefile)
They are the exception and not the rule.

Personally, I would say if you have over 1GB of ram, then you only need a
1GB pagefile. Obviously, the easy answer is to setup a pagefile and run for
a while and see how it works. My current pagefile is 768. That's the size I
needed to keep BF2142 from crashing every so often with a low virtual memory
error. Under XP, If I have a pagefile, it's no bigger than 512MB.

Short answer, unless you're doing some other kind of heavy lifting, I'd be
pretty shocked if you needed more than 1 GB pagefile. Especially since you
have 2GB of actual ram.


"Arne-Kolja Bachstein" <a_k_b@web.de> wrote in message
news:93DAFDC3-693D-43AE-B16F-3EE57F5D9EA0@microsoft.com...
> Hi and thanks for all your responses.
>
> After reading all this there seems to be the swap file and the partition
> the game is installed to as a speed factor. I noticed that my swap file is
> located on an other partition at the same drive, so I'll try if it helps
> to move the swap file to the second drive. Don't know why, but must have
> been a mistake when setting up the system. Thank you for pointing me to
> this, my, fault.
>
> Do you have some experiences with the right size of the swap file? At the
> moment I would set it to 3gb fixed size, as my system has 2 gigs of ram
> and I think this will be a good choice. But if you can tell me about
> (Vista based) empirically better sizes please tell me. :-)
>
> Greetings,
>
> Arne

I've been running BF2 on Vista x64 for 3 months and it ran fine, except that
I often had some stuttering when I entered a new map for maybe 30s at the
start of the first round. Plus I had a 1-2min wait at the 'Verifying
Client...' stage as well. I also had a nightmare ALT-TABbing out of BF2 and
some other games. It would take 3 or 4 mins to return to the desktop and
return control to me.

For a while I just accepted it; just figured it was a quirk of Vista. The
Verifying Client problem is well documented but nobody could seem to agree
on a reason.

Anyway, I came across a good deal for the performance RAM I already had, so
I doubled up; I now have 4 x 1GB GeIL Ultra PC6400 RAM.

Suddenly gaming in Vista is a completely different experience. I can switch
out of BF2 at will in a secoind or two (literally). No more stuttering at
the start of a nw map. And Verifying Client takes seconds and I'm one of the
first on the server.

I hoped for a general improvement in my Vista experience, but I was blown
away...

I think the key amount is 3GB; if you can get to 3GB you'll find Windows and
BF2 can coexist without overlapping and thus SuperFetch can anticipate which
BF2 files to load next to smooth yout gaming experience.

Another smaller (but cheaper) improvement is to get yourself a cheap flash
disk (for the record I got a 2GB Kingston DataTraveller from Amazon for £12)
and use it for ReadyBoost. This put a copy of the pagefile on flash disk
which means when Windows need to retrieve a smaller file from cache it can
access it quicker that via the HDD. This won't help at all with some of the
large files used in BF2, but it helps out elsewhere. Performance gains for
from 1 or 2% to 20% but for those with 2Gb or more memory, I reckon that the
general performance boost will be somewere in the region of 2-5% [estimate].
For the record, my ReadyBoost hit-rate is 71% in a typical session.