increasing memory for new game (without adding ram) HOW?

well i currently only have 512 ram right now, but i want to try the DiRT Demo. but when ever i try to play it it lags like crazy. i don't want to buy new ram because im still waiting for the right time to purchase them. im still waiting for the GSkills 2gb 1gb X2 at newegg to go lower. just a few days ago it was 69.99 and now it went up to 79.99, so pissed i want the price to go lower before i purchase it, but i was wondering if there was a way to increase memory. does virtual memory help at all? if so how do you increase it, because i have tried but to me i really don't see any difference when i do. any other ideas?

 

Turn off everything else running in the background, like MSN, Anti-Virus, etc.

 

so im going to do that, close background programs, i also set the virtual ram higher, 2.00gb plus the physical ram is 512. would that help at all? any significant difference?
personal experiences?

 

You are not going to get much gain beyond what coriolis recommended. Turning off all those unneccesary services and stuff saves you CPU and memory cycles but in order to get the jump in performance you are looking for then RAM would definitely be a noticeable difference.

 

Virtual memory won't help performance. It's what allows the game to run at all (the OS pretends that it has more RAM than it really does, which means the game can get the memory it needs. Otherwise it'd crash)
so the fact that it runs at all means there's enough virtual memory (if there isn't, Windows will generally add more by itself). More of it won't make any difference.

 

It's probably "lagging like crazy" because you're actually using the page file. You'll know this is the problem if your hard drive sounds like it's having a heart attack the whole time you're playing the game.

Alternately, your video card could be too crappy to run the game.

 

Memory prices aren't going to keep plummeting as they have been recently. In fact, spot prices have been rising, to the tune of something like 10% already from the bottom. I can't be certain that they won't keep going up. The prices currently are extremely low and some DRAM makers are making extremely slim to actually losing money.

It may be a little geeky, but I'm subscribed to the DRAMeXchange newsletter. It keeps me informed on the industry and marketplace.

http://www.dramexchange.com/

 

If you're running windows vista you can try using readyboost on a USB flash drive. You're gonna need a seriously fast stick with that little ram... although even a slow usb drive will improve game performance since you only have 512mb. This is just a temporary solution since your flash drive would probably die with such heavy usage (from what I understand NAND flash can be read/written at least 500,000 times). Might as well buy more ram.

Oh and ram prices are supposed to be going back up soon.

 

really i did not know that!
but other than that, is there a readyboost for windows XP? or could you use it for windows xp also? cause thats where i usually install most of my games, not vista (dual boot). also this would work with a memorystick right? (in reader)

 

First of all don't install vista, even with readyboost it requires so much more RAM that if you try and game under it with 512MB your machine will probably explode.

Try the following:

1.) Download a disk management prog like partition magic.
2.) Create a 1GB-1.5GB partition at the beginning of the drive.
3.) Go to your pagefile settings and set just one pagefile of ~1.49GB on this partition, disable all others.

It optimizes pagefile access a bit and sometimes helps with memory issues.

You should also generally try and tweak windows as other have said. In fact the best thing to do would be to download nlite and do a fresh install of XP with everything you don't need removed. It is possible to greatly reduce XP's memory usage this way, leaving more for games. I have gotten a very trimmed XP base install running quite acceptably on a Pentium MMX 166 with 48MB of RAM.

There are some good guides as to what to remove here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=89

 

Ready boost is supposed to make applications load faster, I dont think it will help with game performance...

It may, but I have my suspision that its not quite smart enough to tell the game "hey im system ram, you can put textures here" and things like that.

The best thing you can do is turn the game down to its lowest settings, and play with as low of a resolution as you can.

It played ok on my system at 1920x1080 but had some kind of bug loading took FOREVER, i lowered it down to 12x7 and it loaded super fast and ran super smooth but looked just as good.

 

It doesn't need to be smart enough for that. It works just like the pagefile. When data that isn't already in RAM is needed, the OS pushes some other data out of RAM to the pagefile. (generally something approaching the least used data). And then the OS just has to decide whether to put it on a USB stick or the harddisk pagefile. Then all it takes is for the OS to figure out a decent algorithm for which data should go where. (I'd guess small chnuks of data are more likely to be sent to the USB stick due to its lousy transfer rate but high seek times, while larger files would probably be sent to the HD pagefile)

I wouldn't expect miracles though. First, it means you'd have to run it under Vista which itself requires more memory, and second, it just never boosts performance by that much. USB sticks aren't exactly top performers.

 

Running DiRT on your laptop? Please... you haven't even mentioned your video card yet and you only have 512 Mb of RAM which isn't even the minimum! The minimum RAM required of DiRT is 1 Gb. This game is definitely one that chokes the latest systems. So if you're planning on playing DiRT, go get a decent desktop or a high-end laptop.

Face it. You can't run DiRT on your laptop. Just get one for the Xbox 360, assuming you have.

 

Your not missing much anyways, I uninstalled that demo from my desktop last week, its encoded pretty bad (still its a demo I know its not final) and it controls like your on ice.....

 

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6167115/index.html?tag=result;title;0

Gamespot did a few gaming tests with vista ready boost a while back. For a system with 512mb ram, ready boost did improve gaming performance as you can see from the charts they made but it's still no substitute for more ram.