slipispsycho Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 firstly, part of this credit goes to chngdman... as he was the first one to actually bring up the pagefile idea to me to begin with secondly, if you've already done this, there's no point in saying 'what a noob i've already done that' or the like, this is to help those who haven't... i just recently figured it out so it's reasonable to surmise there are others who haven't. does your computer have 2 seperate hard drives? after some reasearch i found that your computer would run better if you dedicated your pagefile to your secondary drive, rather then the primary one (the one with your OS on it) so i did just that.... while the game still isn't perfect, it is running a bit better.... so try putting your page file on your secondary drive, rather then your main one (it's easy to figure out how. on vista you right click on my computer, go to properties, then click the link on the left that says advanced system settings, then under performance click settings, then under virtual memory click change and change it from there.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
noVa Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 i have my game on my second hdd so that wouldn't be wise for me. c drive = OS and mp3 files and page file d drive = game i was thinking about installing a small third drive for a dedicated page file but don't know if it would be worth it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ppehrson Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 firstly, part of this credit goes to chngdman... as he was the first one to actually bring up the pagefile idea to me to begin with secondly, if you've already done this, there's no point in saying 'what a noob i've already done that' or the like, this is to help those who haven't... i just recently figured it out so it's reasonable to surmise there are others who haven't. does your computer have 2 seperate hard drives? after some reasearch i found that your computer would run better if you dedicated your pagefile to your secondary drive, rather then the primary one (the one with your OS on it) so i did just that.... while the game still isn't perfect, it is running a bit better.... so try putting your page file on your secondary drive, rather then your main one (it's easy to figure out how. on vista you right click on my computer, go to properties, then click the link on the left that says advanced system settings, then under performance click settings, then under virtual memory click change and change it from there.) This is another smart tip that has been bombed. While it may give a very slight boost, it will be so little that you might want to ... not bother. In average, 1 or 2 fps increase. If it was with a computer architecture say, 5-6 years old, it would probably work out nicely. But not on SATA drives. They are so fast anyway that they can handle the data rate just fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chevyboy Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 firstly, part of this credit goes to chngdman... as he was the first one to actually bring up the pagefile idea to me to begin with secondly, if you've already done this, there's no point in saying 'what a noob i've already done that' or the like, this is to help those who haven't... i just recently figured it out so it's reasonable to surmise there are others who haven't. does your computer have 2 seperate hard drives? after some reasearch i found that your computer would run better if you dedicated your pagefile to your secondary drive, rather then the primary one (the one with your OS on it) so i did just that.... while the game still isn't perfect, it is running a bit better.... so try putting your page file on your secondary drive, rather then your main one (it's easy to figure out how. on vista you right click on my computer, go to properties, then click the link on the left that says advanced system settings, then under performance click settings, then under virtual memory click change and change it from there.) This is another smart tip that has been bombed. While it may give a very slight boost, it will be so little that you might want to ... not bother. In average, 1 or 2 fps increase. If it was with a computer architecture say, 5-6 years old, it would probably work out nicely. But not on SATA drives. They are so fast anyway that they can handle the data rate just fine. Very unlikely to see a 1-2 FPS boost from this. While yes it does offer a slight performance increase, you will never notice it with the naked eye and should never see more than a 1 FPS average increase. Dunno if it was mentioned in the OP's topic but this is not advisable if your second HD is slower than the OS drive. As ppehrson suggested, most modern computers will not have any noticeable benefit from this, older computers with lower amounts of system ram and slow hard drives may notice a boost but modern systems, not so much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chngdman Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 (edited) I'm glad you got it sorted dude! This is indeed a good tweak for systems that could use it, and your system will work way more efficiently all around in the way you have it set now. I would figure all around, but I am surprised the game itself improved, unless you noticed faster boot time and stuff too, right? For anyone going to try this, try www.defraggler.com, do a defragment, reboot, and then a FREE SPACE DEFRAGMENT - ALLOW FRAGMENTATION before you do it. This will compact all of your files and your page file will be sure not to be fragmented when it is created. Then reboot, and run a full defragment, and then another freespace, this time do not allow fragmentation. (page file will never be touched by defrag programs - doing these steps ensures you don't write a huge fragmented page file that does the opposite in helping with the tweak and actually slows) Edited January 9, 2009 by chngdman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
copperwire93 Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 I add virtual paging mem in all my drive, is that okay? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chngdman Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 Yes, that is fine. It is mostly advised you only have one, but if you have multiple partitions on a single drive or more than two physical disks, it can help a lot too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slipispsycho Posted January 9, 2009 Author Share Posted January 9, 2009 when i said the game's running better i wasn't talking about boosting performance, i was more talking about crashes, lag, etc... unless it's a coincidence it has helped a bit.... the game is far from running as clockwork... but before i did this, i had about an hour, maybe 2 before the game crahsed completely (more often then not me having to restart my computer before i could even surf the web or re-open it due to how slowly it was running) like i said, it's far from perfect, but every bit does help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thales100 Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 Thats the way i prefer too. Paging file always to a secondary fast HD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord of the Flies Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 My hdd's run extremely fast. Not sure what it does for GTA, but I have no problems with the game at medium high settings with the sliders around 50. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
czdesigns Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 is this better than having no pagefile at all? ^_^ i have a third hd sitting here doing nothing at all... a 80gb 7200rpm hd. will it do any good? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thales100 Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 is this better than having no pagefile at all? ^_^i have a third hd sitting here doing nothing at all... a 80gb 7200rpm hd. will it do any good? A pagefile is generally recommended, setting it to 0 may cause some problem sooner or later - set it to this third HD and see how it goes. For further info if you want you may check the Tweak Guide (sig) , there is some tips about oaging file and memory / hd optimization. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bidji Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 you wouldn't believe the number of partitions/drives I'm using... with regard to page file, I have it split on two different partitions, one being on a different disk than the one where the OS is. and the game is on a third HDD. that's a good advice, anyhow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
czdesigns Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 is this better than having no pagefile at all? ^_^i have a third hd sitting here doing nothing at all... a 80gb 7200rpm hd. will it do any good? A pagefile is generally recommended, setting it to 0 may cause some problem sooner or later - set it to this third HD and see how it goes. For further info if you want you may check the Tweak Guide (sig) , there is some tips about oaging file and memory / hd optimization. thanks. will try it out later (still downloading some crappy game from steam). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StoneCold_ZA Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 I don't even use a pagefile, its for noobs Seriously though, with 4GB RAM myself, I hardly see the need for a pagefile. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
noVa Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 while this really only adds about 1-2 fps to the game it does stop some of the stuttering i get as its not trying to read textures whilst trying to stream mp3's whilst pushing stuff into the page file all on the same drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
[email protected] Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 (edited) In any case, the last thing you want a game to do is use the pagefile. Example: 1) Speed of a 7200rpm (IDE/SATA doesn't matter) is around 40MB/sec 2) Speed of a DDR2 DIMM, somewhere around 10-15GB/sec (guess) 3) Speed of GDDR5, somewhere around 100GB/sec (guess) Edit: to avoid GTA IV using the page file you should get more than 2GB of ram. This is because a 32bit process can allocate a maximum of 2GB and it would be a good idea to let GTA IV take that 2GB for itself instead of sharing it with other processes. If you have 3GB or more, there is atleast 1GB for you to spend on background processes. This may also require a 64bit os, depending on how much ram you get. If you want to seriously boost the speed of the pagefile, then: 1) Create a RAM Disk. This is a piece of RAM memory that shows up in Explorer as a partition (C: D: etc.) 2) Disable all page files and create a new one on this RAM Disk, with the size around 2048MB. The RAM Disk method obviously requires you to have alot of RAM so that you can give away 2-4GB of it to the ram partition. If you have enough RAM to be able to spend it on a RAM Drive then you already have enough for any application to run in the RAM alone, rendering the pagefile useless. If you for some reason need to do this to speed up an application or game then that application was either a) not made to be used the way you are using it or b) badly made. What this would seriously boost though is the loading times, I wonder if you would ever even get to see the GTA IV loading screen when starting the game if the game was installed on the RAM partition (afterall, it could be up to 400 times faster)... now that would be something to brag about Edit: depending on how the RAM Disks work, installing the game on it could mean you'd have to reinstall it every time you restart your computer and the RAM memory is cleaned... kind of a drawback... and you would need around 20GB of ram... Edited January 9, 2009 by [email protected] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xtremist5150 Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 firstly, part of this credit goes to chngdman... as he was the first one to actually bring up the pagefile idea to me to begin with secondly, if you've already done this, there's no point in saying 'what a noob i've already done that' or the like, this is to help those who haven't... i just recently figured it out so it's reasonable to surmise there are others who haven't. does your computer have 2 seperate hard drives? after some reasearch i found that your computer would run better if you dedicated your pagefile to your secondary drive, rather then the primary one (the one with your OS on it) so i did just that.... while the game still isn't perfect, it is running a bit better.... so try putting your page file on your secondary drive, rather then your main one (it's easy to figure out how. on vista you right click on my computer, go to properties, then click the link on the left that says advanced system settings, then under performance click settings, then under virtual memory click change and change it from there.) what a noob i've already done that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NightmareGK13 Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 i have an external hard drive can i use it ? i did go to virtual memory settings and applied some settings but will it work using an external hd Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FazZfilmz Posted January 10, 2009 Share Posted January 10, 2009 WTF? People are still use ONE HDD (hard disk drive)? What year is it? It's very important to have a Pagefile on a second drive and not on the main system drive at all. I'm not shouting about my system, but I've set it up so only 2Gb (2048mb) Pagefiles are set up on 3 individual drives and a forth for caching and temp files. In total the main system will use 6 drives within the case and 8 external via a SATA bay box thingy. The for the OS, to keep things stable and fast (without any HDD lag, failovers or faults) the OS is on a 2xRaptor raid and the other four as mentioned above, including the usual stuff like you documents, images on one, music on another, games on another too, with a backup of important stuff on another and all HD movies external, with two additional raptor drives set up in raid for editing purposes in Premiere, Vegas, Photoshop etc. Anywho, the point being, you system will not just improve in running speed, but will struggle a lot less, pro-long the life of your HDD and overall speed. I only have 4Gb DDR3 on the system, as I'm still trying to get at least 8Gb of actual memory on the system (funds permitting), but mean while I use the USB memory boost at 4Gb on a very fast (but also very cheap these days) USB drive and another temp backup on another 8Gb USB drive, in case of any failures, which has saved me twice 2008, due to dodgy drivers (Nvidia to point fingers at one company... but I still love'em). I would *highly* recommend setting up one (if not more) Pagefiles on additional drives, as you honestly can never have enough memory (real or fake) on Vista if you use it heavily too. If you are simply just doing very basic stuff, you won't notice much change, but would still benefit from the system being less stressed with one drive trying to do everything. Remember, a HDD is simply a record with a fast needle. Accessing the OS, plus you random bits running in the background, the your main application you are running such as GTA IV in this case and then a Pagefile is not a good idea iMHO! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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