This is the Mother of Performance tweaks for and all games!!
Thu Aug 14, 2003 6:06 am
I was just messing around with Windows and decided to change a few settings and these setting made every game I play: Planeside, Quake 3, Delta Force: BHD, and others all play very fast. What I mean by very fast is I used to have the settings of the game on low and the resolution on low and now I can set all settings to max and raise the resolution and it fly without any hitching or major FPS drops!!!!! To achieve this feature I realized that I only had 512mb of ram so I read about what the Windows swap file dose. Then I realized the higher I set the higher I could have setting in game set! I have 512mb of ram and the recommended setting for the Windows swap file is 1.5 – 2 times the amount of ram you have but if you set it to a Higher amount it will use up all of your ram and use the amount of space specified on your hard drive as Virtual ram!!!!!!! Here are the settings that I believe will work and make your computer use about 2gb’s of space as ram which makes the games think you have X amount of ram!
This setting has only been tested on machines running Windows XP but should work on all Windows OS’s.
To access the page where you can change the size of the Windows swap file click on start, then Control Panel, then double click on System, the click on the forth tab over on the top labeled Advanced, then under Performance click on the Settings button, now click on the tab advanced, then at the bottom is should say Virtual Memory click on the Change button, Now select which drive you want the 2GB swap file to be on, and under paging file size for selected drive click the Custom size Dot, Then where it says
Initial size (MB): type in 2048
Maximum size (MB): type in 2048
Then click the Set button and click the OK button will your back to your desktop. After you have changed this setting you may be prompted to restart you computer for the settings to take effect do so. If you were not prompted to restart do so anyways. Now go play some games. This setting for me made all my games play with Higher FPS (Frames Per Second) with texture settings set to max! The games I noticed that had a significant Increase in Peformance were Delta Force: BHD, Quake 3, Medal of Honor, Unreal Tournament 2003, Planeside, Battlefield 1942, GTA: VC , Vietcong, NFS: HP2 RTCW, MotoGP2. Even the shuttering in Morrowwind stopped! These games listed are the only ones I have tried but all games should get the performance increase.
This setting should cause no problems or loss in performance if it dose contact me at xaero001@yahoo.com I hope this solves all problems with games shuttering and slowdowns.
This setting has only been tested on machines running Windows XP but should work on all Windows OS’s.
To access the page where you can change the size of the Windows swap file click on start, then Control Panel, then double click on System, the click on the forth tab over on the top labeled Advanced, then under Performance click on the Settings button, now click on the tab advanced, then at the bottom is should say Virtual Memory click on the Change button, Now select which drive you want the 2GB swap file to be on, and under paging file size for selected drive click the Custom size Dot, Then where it says
Initial size (MB): type in 2048
Maximum size (MB): type in 2048
Then click the Set button and click the OK button will your back to your desktop. After you have changed this setting you may be prompted to restart you computer for the settings to take effect do so. If you were not prompted to restart do so anyways. Now go play some games. This setting for me made all my games play with Higher FPS (Frames Per Second) with texture settings set to max! The games I noticed that had a significant Increase in Peformance were Delta Force: BHD, Quake 3, Medal of Honor, Unreal Tournament 2003, Planeside, Battlefield 1942, GTA: VC , Vietcong, NFS: HP2 RTCW, MotoGP2. Even the shuttering in Morrowwind stopped! These games listed are the only ones I have tried but all games should get the performance increase.
This setting should cause no problems or loss in performance if it dose contact me at xaero001@yahoo.com I hope this solves all problems with games shuttering and slowdowns.
Thu Aug 14, 2003 6:22 am
I dont think this should be in the nba live 2004 section 
Thu Aug 14, 2003 11:53 am
I don't think this works. There are two basic problems with your logic:
1) Increasing RAM does NOT increase framerate unless you have a LOT of swapping in a game.
2) You assume hd access is as fast as accessing RAM. The ONLY reason windows uses virtual memory (swap file) is because not everyone has a lot of RAM available. Swapping out to virtual memory is a way to eleviate this (hence the name). Unforunately it is PAINFULLY slow compared to RAM.
The only game I've seen where managing your swap file helps a lot is UT2003 since it is a memory hog. However, the only way framerate can increase is IF you had A LOT of swapping to your hd during the game which definitely kills your fps. If I'm running @ 60fps right now in UT2003 and there is very little swapping the way it is, I doubt increasing my swap file to 2 gigs will help. If that were the case, I should just throw away that extra 256megs of RAM and new graphics card I bought and just increase my swap file size!
On a side-note, what WILL increase performance is setting your initial and max size virtual memory to the same. This probably won't increase your fps in games however, just loading times maybe.
1) Increasing RAM does NOT increase framerate unless you have a LOT of swapping in a game.
2) You assume hd access is as fast as accessing RAM. The ONLY reason windows uses virtual memory (swap file) is because not everyone has a lot of RAM available. Swapping out to virtual memory is a way to eleviate this (hence the name). Unforunately it is PAINFULLY slow compared to RAM.
The only game I've seen where managing your swap file helps a lot is UT2003 since it is a memory hog. However, the only way framerate can increase is IF you had A LOT of swapping to your hd during the game which definitely kills your fps. If I'm running @ 60fps right now in UT2003 and there is very little swapping the way it is, I doubt increasing my swap file to 2 gigs will help. If that were the case, I should just throw away that extra 256megs of RAM and new graphics card I bought and just increase my swap file size!
On a side-note, what WILL increase performance is setting your initial and max size virtual memory to the same. This probably won't increase your fps in games however, just loading times maybe.