Battlefield 2: Swapping extreme

[Arne-Kolja Bachstein]

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

 

[grahamham]

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

 

[Dale White]

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.

 

[grahamham]

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

 

[Burn242]

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.

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

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 ?

 

[Arne-Kolja Bachstein]

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

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

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.

 

[CJM]

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.

 

[Guest]

When running BF 2, I get LOADS of disk activity for the first 2-3 minutes of
every round. I am running a 3.0GHZ Pentium D with 2 GB 667MHz Ram, and a 1GB
Pendrive with the Speedboost technology. The graphics are smooth as silk,
however, the game stutters when reading the disk.

 

[Dale M. White]

I'm going ot have to look at your fix.I Played for about 2 1/2 hours tonight
and I hooked up a second monitor, so I could watch resource monitor on it
while i played. I wanted to see where all the disk activity was.

After watching that, I'm not sure it's completely a pagefile issue.
Everytime my system would lag, it wasn't the page file getting hammered, but
files like Common_client.zip and objects.client.zip. This would happen about
5 mins into the game and would last for 15 mins after the load of a map.

The whole time my max CPU was at 75% and max memory was 1.38GB out of 2GB.
I'm also wondering of some of the stuttering is video card related why it
loads up the textures or something. The game seems to be a tad more jerky
the first 2-3 mins of map and then smooths out.

It was really odd that 10-15 mins into the game, I see those two zip files
getting a very high read rate on them. Not sure if that's a punkbuster check
or not. I have that folder excluded in my anti-virus, as well as I stopped
my AV while I was playing.

So I'm no longer positive more memory would help, since the pagefile access
was there, but light. It was the ZIP files that would cause my system to
chug along. Wonder what Vista is doing that XP isn't ?

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.

 

[Arne-Kolja Bachstein]

Hi Dale,

interesting... do you know if it works to simply unzip those files before
playing? I know it works for several games (Quake and UT if I remember
correctly), but don't know how PunkBuster would behave then...

Greets,

Arne
http://www.arnekolja.com

 

[Dale M. White]

Doom3 also worked that way, but it doesn't appear BF does. I extracted the
files out, but I noticed it still read the zip file.

Interestingly enough, I've not been able to reproduce the problem again
today. While playing I did have a 5-7 sec stutter, when I looked at the disk
activity, it showed a ~M12d312.tmp file being access\created. It went away
and so did the stutter.

One thing I change from last night to today, is I turned the UAC, guess I'll
have to turn i tback on and see if I get the stutter. Though it's possible
this problem is limited to servers running Punkbuster, I don't know if the
server I was on last night was or wasn't.

 

[Arne-Kolja Bachstein]

Battlefield won't work that way because PunkBuster checks for the checksum
of the ZIP files. But what I did notice: Windows Defender checks the content
of ZIP files per default, maybe this is the problem. I excluded the BF dirs
now from Windows Defender (it's an option inside Defender) and am going to
test a few rounds now.

 

[Dale M. White]

I don' even have windows defender installed ( I did a custom install using
vlite to remove it) So I would be surprised if that was the case.

If it's punkbuster then I wonder why it's pegging the system out, when it's
not a problem under XP. Basically, what is Vista doing different.

 

[grahamham]

Did upgrading to 4GB make any difference?

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.

I have been having the identical problems as yourself with 2GB of
Corsair PC6400 in Vista 64BIT .

I have bitten the bullet and ordered 4Gb of OCZ Platinum revision 2 (
not been happy with the Corsair since i bought it last August ) . I
will report back when it's installed , hoping my EVGA 680I does not
play up and tell you all my findings .

At the momnet i am stuck playing in Servers that have a mapp rotation
of 50 rounds as its painfull to load a new map every 2 .


--
Baldeagle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Baldeagle's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/member.php?userid=22367
View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=681849

http://forums.techarena.in

 

[grahamham]

well ,removing the videos did squat

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

 

[Dale White]

Is this something you can help quantify ? I'm having trouble wrapping my
mind around the need to have 4GB to play something that doesn't need 2GB. If
it does take 4GB to play BF2 without the stuttering, it's another reason not
to have Vista, and stick with XP for a while longer

Here's a test I ran. I started BF2, made sure all my textures were
optimized. Rebooted.
Started BF2, went to Multiplayer, created a game, I choose the man Songhua
Stalemate 64 (since I wanted a big map with lots of textures) Once I click
the start button, I click the stop watch. Once I get the Join button, I
click stop. Here's what I found so far.

On XP, it takes 57 secs to load a map from a freshly booted system. After
that, all other maps load in 17-20 secs
On Vista32, it takes 43 secs to load a map from a freshly booted system.
After that, all other maps load in 14-18secs
On Vista64, it takes 43 secs to load a map from a freshly booted system.
After that, all other maps load in 14-18secs.

Connecting to a live server, is a different story, it took 1min 2 secs to
connect. that additional 20 secs was mostly at the verifying client data
screen. This is why I ran the test localling, depending on latency and such,
live server connects will vary.

Anyways, Could you run the above test with 2GB of ram and then again at 4GB
? I'd really be surprise if teh 4GB made any different at that stage, since
most of the load time is reading the harddisk. Though Superfetching may skew
those numbers as well

 

[CJM]

Anyways, Could you run the above test with 2GB of ram and then again at
4GB ? I'd really be surprise if teh 4GB made any different at that stage,
since most of the load time is reading the harddisk. Though Superfetching
may skew those numbers as well

I haven't been quite so scientific, but I've seen enough. On my machine, I
had 1-2mins verifying client... Double the RAM up to 4GB it takes between 5s
& 30s.

 

[Dale M. White]

I haven't been quite so scientific, but I've seen enough. On my machine, I
had 1-2mins verifying client... Double the RAM up to 4GB it takes between
5s & 30s.

I guess this is where I'm really confused. I see an extra 20 secs to verify
a client on a internet server vs. local and you're taking 1-2 mins to verify
the client. Maybe it's the way prefetch does something, I just don't know
why it would take 1-2 mins to begin with or why more ram would fix it.
Again, I'm just having trouble wrapping my mind around the need for 4GB of
ram, when I can't see 2GB being fully used.
I guess if I was seeing 1-2 mins client verifies I could follow, but since
I'm not, I'm wondering what the heck is going on on your system at 2GB,
that's isn't going on with mine. (maybe because I run superfetch and
readyboost off, I'm not wasting ram loading stuff I'm not using, to where
you are having to swap out. I dunno