Hello. Maybe some of You could help me understand, how does memory management of PS2 work. After reading some posts stating, that setting graphics and textures to ultra can help improve performance I tried it myself. Hard to say if it works as expected, but I encountered other problems. Random FPS drops connected with working HDD - typical when memory runs out and system is using pagefile as additional memory. Things that I expect with ultra setting and 4GB of RAM (that's all I have). Despite I'd rather think, that textures should be stored in graphic card memory (gtx 460 1GB). But then I checked task manager and it appears, that game was using 2,3 GB of memory only (1,7 GB with previous settings). Whole rest of the processes (all users) used less than 250MB (I am using GameBooster). Despite of that, free memory was only 350MB. Strange. Firstly I thought, that Win 7 64bit (home edition) is using as much memory, although it was hard to believe in. Then I tested it with other apps, and I managed to force Blender (3d app) to use 2 GB of memory - free memory was well over 1,6 GB and that was the result I expected. I also simultaneously ran 3 apps, that together took almost 3,5 GB of RAM without problems. So why PS2 causes system slowdowns when it uses only 2,3 GB of RAM and why there is only 350MB free memory when the game is running ?
My guess is if you're using ultra texture and you're getting FPS drops with associated HDD thrashing, your video memory is filling up and it's pulling from the HDD instead. Might be that 1gb isn't enough. Maybe tinker with the LOD settings?
Ultra settings work fine but you need some decent RAM on your GPU. I had stuttering with 1.5GB of RAM on my GTX 590 and now I have the 3GB HD 7970 it is perfectly smooth. Desktop RAM is very cheap now, you can pick up 8GB for $50 easily, that alone would make a huge difference to your game, upgrading the graphics card would be next on the list but would cost more.
You have a 1gb video card, ultra textures in this game will push you closer to your 1gb limit. There are other settings which also take up lots of vram, so I'm going to guess your vram is maxed. You will see performance issues if you are trying to go over 1gb, you need to set textures to high. If you can get it to hover around 900mb then you should be good. If you want to monitor your vram usage while ingame, i suggest msi afterburner's on-screen display.
So You are suggesting, that it is vram rather than ram, that is causing the problems ? I'll try to do as You suggest and I will check if it's usage is close to 1GB and let You know.
Well your ultra settings could explain the increase in extra ram usage, I don't know the technical explanation for this but your vram will 'reserve' a certain amount of your sdram. And you certainly wouldn't run smoothly with capped out vram. Did you give it a shot yet?
The game uses about 2GB because (I beieve, although I haven't researched it) that it is not large address aware - limiting it to 2GB. I don't know why they did this as this is very easy to fix by just having the exe be flagged as such for the OS to allow it to use more. As for you not having more RMA be free - this is perfectly normal. Dont look at "free" memory. Look at "availiable" memory. Windows simply fills up otherwise unused RAM (if nothing else is requesting more RAM) with cached data for stuff you use a lot - so that it can run those often used programs faster by having it ready in memory for you. The instant any application runs that needs that memory that is used for cache then it just writes over that cache so there is no performance penalty for using this feature of windows. As said it is "available RAM" that is worth looking at. All in all this all sounds perfectly normal. EDIT: Oh and as far as textures go you should use as high as you can fit into video memory. As long as the textures can fit in the video memory the penalty for using higher quality textures is almost not detectable - and the quality difference is large. I run ultra textures easily on a card with 1500MB, but I don't know what the threshold for running ultra is exactly... maybe ask support or something for that. If you do run textures higher than what can fit in video memory then you will get sudden chugging - as the system needs to occationally swap out some textures for others because it can't keep it all loaded up at the same time. It might be that ultra requires more than 1GB memory, but if that is the case I am sure that at least high should be no problem. -Stigma
I couldn't find settings in msi afterburner to show vram usage, but I used gpu-z to do the job. With textures on "ultra" vram usage was ~900-940 MB, but not 1000.The game used ~2,4 GB. There was ~350 free and available RAM (values were almost the same). So I am still what is going on with RAM usage, when this game is running. After I changed textures to "high" vram usage was ~690-750 MB and the game took ~2 GB. Free and available RAM ~550 MB (again, values were very close to each other). FPS drops and pagefile usage occured very rarely, but still (although it was so occasional and short, that it wasn't a problem). Still, strange thing is, that when i run other app that use 2 GB or more, i have over 1,5GB of available memory.
actually it is the shared system memory, when u use ultra textures it exceeds ur graphic card limit of 1gb. U see 900-940 mb because the left over memory is used in to run the desktop, then textures are load on ur shared system memory (RAM). that why u see only 550 mb free memory. and u get the sluttring because textures are load from HDD to ram and to graphic card so thats why u get the sluttring . also ur page files gets being used aswell which increases HDD usage and causing high letancy issues. i u want to run ultra u need a 2 gb grahic card
