You wrote in thusly:
[Cut]
Mark said:
You wrote in thusly:
It is recommended that you keep the AGP aperture around 64MB to 128MB
in size. Lower if you have a lot of on-board GFX memory.
That's sounds like the majority of your problem right there, not
enough physical memory. That, and perhaps swapping that is likely
occurring.
When is the last time you de-fragged your hard drive? Do you have a
static or dynamic swap space? Separate hard drive or partition for
the Pagefile? Can you tell if the delay happens when the hard drive
is being accessed?
[Paste]
How much memory are we talking about... as it is no problem to get
more.
Like 'Jason A' said, "more is better". I currently have 2GB. When you
get to 3GB and above, Windows or motherboard devices starts to steal and
dedicate memory for themselves. So for example if you installed 4GB of
memory and you look in Task Manager, you might see 3.5GB available. It's
something like that, don't quote me on it, I read it somewhere.
As for fragmentation, I uses O&O Defrag set on auto, but every few
days I force it to defrag... I'm pretty picky about a messy hard
drive.
If asked, I would recommend using Perfect Disk (not free). I tried all
sorts of different programs and in my experience PD was the hardest
working one of the lot. Regardless, you do defrag the hard drive, so
that's not likely to be the problem.
I've noticed that my pagefile is dynamic set at a range of 768-1536MB.
I can set the size as static to my 250GB secondary hard drive and
defrag (SPACE) the main to see if I get improvement.
I don't like Windows managing my pagefile, so I have taken a couple of
steps to insure that the pagefile is optimal. These include:
1) Creating a 3.01GB partition on a separate drive on a different
controller.
2) Turning off dynamic allocation and setting a static 3GB.
My pagefile sits on the assigned letter 'P' partition (for Page [1]) of
a SATA drive that is not associated with the Windows active OS
partition/drive. They (the OS and Page) are physically on different
controllers and different drives. The partition is just big enough for
the 3GB pagefile to exsist without wasting hard drive space. Combined
with static allocation, the 3GB page file can not fragment in a 3.01GB
partition and has the ability to work independently of the OS drive.
This is NOT to be confused with using the same pagefile with different
OS installations.
[1] Besides the device letter 'P' for 'P'agefile, I've also assigned the
device letter 'R' for DVD optical 'R'eader, 'V' for 'V'irtual DVD
optical reader and 'W' for DVD optical 'W'riter.
Not sure if delays occur during hard drive activity as I'm in next
room.
I think it's very likely that the game is eating into your 512MBs of
physical RAM. If you do upgrade the amount of RAM in your system, other
things you do with the computer will benefit. So, there is no downside
to adding more RAM, even if it doesn't help with Need For Speed
directly.
I forgot to ask... should I further reduce my AGP aperture size to 64
(now at 128) regardless if I may not have the right amount of on-board
GFX memory?
I'm not really the best person to answer this. Even if you look up the
information on Google you'll get slightly different opinions. I can say
for sure that with my AIW 9800 Pro video card, I have my AGP Aperture
Size set to 128MB in BIOS. I also have 2GB of memory should all of the
128MB be needed. So with that in mind, here's a quote from TechpowerUp:
First of all, AGP Aperture memory will not be used until your video
card's on-board memory is running low. That means it will usually not
impact your gaming performance because developers are trying hard to not
exceed the on-board memory limits.
The bigger your video memory, the smaller your Aperture Size could be.
However with later games requiring more and more texture memory a good
number seems to be 128MB Aperture Size for all cards with 64 MB to 256
MB Video RAM.
Setting the Aperture Size to HUGE values will not increase performance
because this merely sets the maximum amount of physical memory that can
be used. It only makes the GART Table bigger because every 4K page has
its own entry, no matter if allocated or not.
Setting the Aperture Size to too small values could result in running
out of available texture memory especially on a low-mem video card. It
is also possible that developers make use of the GART's features by
creating textures as 'non-local'.
I'm looking into buying 2GB today. Enough to disable the pagefile and
speed things up for gameplay (I hope).
I would not disable the pagefile. As I mentioned above, set aside a
small partition and place a static pagefile in there on its own
controller. Even if you don't have a separate controller, I still
wouldn't disable the pagefile.
