Turning off Virtual Page File (virtual memory) seemed to help BF3

Try it and find out. This is the only way to disable the pagefile (not entirely) and still have it present for compatibility reasons. In general though, especially if you have 8GB or less ram, disabling the pagefile isn't going to make a huge difference and will probably be detrimental in situatiuons where you could do with the extra free ram for memory heavy applocations/texture heavy games.

 

I have Virtual Page File disabled and all my games are much more stable now, also performance is better too!

Great tip.

 

until windows decides you are running low on ram and tries to start paging stuff to disk >> everything grinds to a hault

 

If you have 8GB or more you can shrink the pagefile to a min-max size of 512MB (or less) for crash file dumping. I disabled it completely and noticed no negative side effects after months of use but now I have a static 512MB pagefile since I started using my current system for audio recording.

Thing is, the pagefile was necessary back in the days of the 486/Pentium 1-3. Since then the importance of a classic pagefile has diminished by every jump in RAM and CPU technology. Today with systems using 8GB or more the pagefile is basically used for crash dump reasons and little else. Most people don't bother with full memory crash dumps (ie. analyse and debug) so a minimal pagefile is one way to stay fairly safe while getting as much performance out of it as possible.

Normal/gaming use will never saturate 8GB of RAM unless you run some really heavy apps in the background (but really, who has an open Photoshop with multiple RAW-file images running in the background while playing Skyrim??).

 

I've seen my system ram usage go above 7GB while palying skyrim. That's with the addition of a 1GB HDD cache created through fancycache, any higher and I got major slowdowns in skyrim.

So normal gaming with the addition of basic background software can and does use upto 8GB system ram, already.

Anyway, I'm staying out of this thread now.

 

7gb wtf? i usually only hit 3gb max.. but then i have a clean os, no apps open i have 700mb of used ram

 

You'd have to be running a heap of mods to use 8GB...not exactly normal gaming imho.

The long and the short of it is if you're running outta ram with the PF disabled - buy more RAM...

 

you can use the task manager to view the memory usage of every process. you may have to select "processes", then go to view->select columns and mark "memory-working set" (current mem. usage) and "memory-peak working set" (max. mem usage of that process so far.

 

Yes, that's right.....any reason you're telling me this? :3eyes:

Tbh the only number that matters is the Commit amount...

 

back in the beta (dont have full), bf3 became unplayable when i go across the map

so i noticed, CF on = a little more ram usage & A LOT more pf allocation usage (& having the browser open for battlelog was wasting 100+mb ram)

at the time i had bf3 on the same physical drive as the pf, bad idea of course since the game is constantly streaming in data, so pf writing turns to 5fps stuttering

i'm on 4gb ram, 8gb PF, vista64, & 4870x2


i'm not sure how windows deals with so called 'disabling' the PF these days, but in xp & for sure 2k, 'disabling' the PF just makes a 20mb PF in the windows folder, so it's never entirely gone


so what am i trying to say for this thread... dont put bf3 on the same drive as your pf (same goes for fraps recording), do note that CF on uses more ram so 4gb is probably not enough even though i've heard of people playing bf3 on a 32bit OS

 

I too notice a slight decrease in boot time.

Nope, unless the OP gives detailed accounts of what he's talking about. I've not seen any improvements in:
load times
frame rates
overall smoothness
But I've seen a slight memory consumption increase though. It's not much to speak of but that's about the only other thing I've noticed without PF.

 

That isn't true about 64 bit. A lot of PC developed games do not have a 64 bit launcher. VERY many infact. Also it is not true about BF3 being a port to PC.

I agree that it would have been a great idea to include a 64 bit launcher, but it is just plain false that is is a port over.

I will be honest about Back to Karkand. That was a direct port over with no increase in textures. But the core BF3 experience is not a port.

 

I'm at 2.45 gb with base software running at the moment. During bf3 I can hit 6.75. Skyrim around the same with pg disabled.

But of course, that's OVERALL and not application specific.

 

It smoothed out my BF3 performance, as I posted before.

 

You need to understand how Windows Memory Management works.

The game has no control over the pagefile - none whatsoever. It lives in the virtual address space created by the OS which also dictates how physical and virtual memory is used...
In fact the game is not aware of the PF...It just thinks it has as much memory to play with as windows tells it it does.
Basically it says hey I need XYZ data at ABC address space and the OS will either get that data from ram or from PF...

Also, I could prob count the number of games with 64bit .exe's on one hand, and you already named 2 of them...90% are just LAA.

And tbh I really don't see how 32 or 64bit has anything to do with enabling/disabling the PF...
I had mine disabled years ago while running XP with 2GB ram...my parents have 1GB installed on XP and I disabled that PF too....it's fine as long as you don't use all your ram, and if you do - well then you never had enough to start with anyway....

My 2c is all...

Oh I meant to add yeah for some reason I don't know why but BF3 uses/used a large amount of virtual memory (not PF).
With 4GB RAM and my PF disabled I ran outta address space when I still had about 1.5Gb ram left...maybe bug idk..?

 

What does that mean exactly though? Do you mean it smoothed out the animation of the characters on the screen? Or something else? In either case, I've seen no difference without pagefile.

 

He prob means less lag or stutter possibly....no disk paging can make smoother gameplay...

 

This isn't an old Amiga game where the entire game could be stored into ram though. There will still be some activity. None of which I've seen made any difference to the 'smoothness'. <shrug>

 

By smoothing out I mean smoothing out when turning around. Like the HyperThreading issue causes it. I'm obviously not speaking of FPS or booting gains, but the game engine microstutters less.

Edit: LOL I'm not the OP
Edit2: If other guys's animations are jerky, your Network Interpolation Setting in Gameplay is set too low (no black bar), move it left a bit so you can see the black bar at appr. 50%.

 

LOL, nope your not the OP. But I've never seen microstuttering though.