Running with no Virtual Memory

[Sgt_SyphonX]

Here are my Specs

XCLIO Windtunnel Full Tower Case
PC Power & Cooling, Silencer - 750W (1 12v 60A Rail)
ABIT IP35 Pro ATX LGA 775 Motherboard (BIOS v16)
Intel E6850 Dual-Core G0 @ OC'd 3.5ghz (1.36v)
8GB OCZ Reaper HPC Edition (4x2) 4-4-4-15 2T
Western Digital Caviar 500GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
Nvidia EVGA GeForce GTX 280 @ OC'd 700mhz Core, 1450 Shader, 1300 Memory
SoundBlaster X-Fi, FaTaLiTy Pro. Series

w/ Vista Ultimate x64

-----

Now, I've always run my game with absolute zero virtual memory. I turned off the paging file and deleted it and have done this for over a year and can typically run every game I play maxed out without much issues. Even games that encroach upon Armed Assault 2's memory needs. I played Arma 1 maxed out and had great performance, granted it's graphically dated, but the need for memory is still there.

Now, I'd assume I could run this game maxed out just as every other, except for one small problem - No x64 support. The game hardly utilizes my RAM and therefore has serious problems with memory. No matter what settings I've tried, I get crap performance and texture memory problems (Textures popping in and out) so I don't really know what to do. I've tried reusing a paging file for the first time in a while, and didn't really see much of a difference.

Is there something I'm missing? What should be my settings for paging both in System settings and Arma 2's config?

-ArmA2.cfg
language="English";
adapter=-1;
3D_Performance=180000;
Resolution_Bpp=32;
Resolution_W=1600;
Resolution_H=1200;
refresh=60;
Render_W=1600;
Render_H=1200;
FSAA=2;
postFX=1;
HDRPrecision=8;
lastDeviceId="";
localVRAM="271566848";
nonlocalVRAM="271566848";

--It's only recognizing 256mb of my 1gb Video Card memory, apparently. I've tried setting this to the respective 1,000mb, but it doesn't seem to do anything. I've even tried changing the nonlocalVRAM to the respective 8,000mb of RAM I have in my system, to no avail. I've also changed the file to Read Only, but it doesn't do anything for the Texture Problems or performance. Also, earlier I checked off Read Only and deleted both numbers, started up, played, then closed. When I checked it again, the .cfg file added the 271566848 to both entries again.

[Bulldogs]

I'm not sure what the settings should be but disabling your paging file is highly frowned upon. I know people who ran nearly everything fine with no paging file but there's always something that doesn't like it. That includes some games, some video editing software. The effect varies from product to product but sometimes it's low framerates, some times it's a BSOD or CTD. I think it's due to the Directx API, or maybe it's just due to the product itself.

Here's a few quotes from people smarter than I :

Some feel having no paging file results in better performance, but in general, having a paging file means Windows can write pages on the modified list (which represent pages that aren’t being accessed actively but have not been saved to disk) out to the paging file, thus making that memory available for more useful purposes (processes or file cache). So while there may be some workloads that perform better with no paging file, in general having one will mean more usable memory being available to the system (never mind that Windows won’t be able to write kernel crash dumps without a paging file sized large enough to hold them).

In the Comments one of the Engineers involved in setting pagefile size for Vista further explains:

Configuring a system with lots of RAM to run without pagefile may have either negative or positive perf impact depending on what the system is doing. The general recommendation in this case is to create a reasonably sized pagefile (for example, 4 GB) and increase it if the Paging file\% Usage counter gets close to 100%.

and

By the way, there are actually 2 separate reasons why pagefiles are necessary.
The first reason is to allow dirty pages that are never (or very rarely) referenced to be moved to disk, freeing up more RAM for other purposes.
The other reason is to enable better use of *virtual* memory, given that physical memory is allocated on demand. Remember that when a process calls VirtualAlloc(MEM_COMMIT) there are no physical pages allocated at this time. Physical pages are only allocated when the app accesses virtual pages for the first time. This is good because it makes committing pages a relatively cheap operation, so apps can commit memory in bigger chunks, without having to worry about each page they may or may not use.
Now, even though committing memory does not allocate physical pages, it still guarantees to the application that reading from/writing to the committed pages will never fail (or deadlock). It might be slow if other physical pages have to be moved to disk in order to make room, but it will eventually succeed.

In other words, while you may see increases in performance in some areas, you're bound to create instabilities and lower your performance greatly in other areas (especially when below 12gb and with programs that can't access more than 4gb or RAM) - for reference, Arma 2 access 2GB of Ram max.

[Mr Fenix]

If you can run without a pagefile then do so. If you have sufficient RAM for your requirements, pagefile is a performance killer.

Like the OP, I can do anything on my PC without a pagefile - except playing Arma2. Since A2 came out, I've grudgingly enabled a pagefile. I have Win7 64-bit.

It's definitely something to do with A2's video options. By adjusting the size of the pagefile to a minimum stable, I can then cause memory exceptions by increasing view distance or increasing texture quality.

---------- Post added at 11:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:10 AM ----------

The day Microsoft have an opinion on memory management that's worth listening to, I'll eat my hat.

[Bulldogs]

Hehe, love the last comment, although if you look into it you'll find that it only increases performance in about 60% of computers and about 30% of those encounter problems. I tested myself with 12gb and 8gb and in both cases I had a drastic drop in performance, but that was just my test machine.

That said, arma 2, at this stage, can only access 2gb of ram at any one time, so any buffered information is stored in the virtual memory, so effectively you're only running on 2gb of ram and without a page file there's no where else to store the data.

[flake]

i think i read that arma is designed to minimise page file useage

[-s!Gm4-]

Now, as you might know, Arma 2 has some serious problems with 8 GB of RAM. Using this amount of RAM causes the Game to detect the gfx-card falsely. This is why your localVRAM and nonlocalVRAm are all messed up.

There are 3 ways to circumvent this issue known to me at the moment:

1. Deinstall some RAM
2. Use the workaround from this thread. BrunoDerRabe ran some tests. I linked you to the right page already.
3. Use older drivers. When I'm running the 181.71 drivers for Win7 the RAM gets detected right, so does the gfx-card. I'm having different issues with this driver, but thats another story.

Now, since I'm no english native-speaker (and too busy right now [got an exam tomorrow at univ] to look it up) I do not know what a "pagefile" is. If it has something to do with the above presented solutions (esp. no.2) then excuse me for pointing out something already known. If not: I'm always willing to learn something new

regards

//edit: Also, you might want to think about going from Vista to Win7/64bit. Not very few folks from the forums report a significant increase of performance due to switching to the newer OS.

[Mr Fenix]

You *may* have a performance hit with pagefile disabled, depending on your setup and useage. I didn't turn off my pagefile until I'd done the math. It worked fine for two years on Arma1 with 2GB RAM. My Arma1 setup had XP 32bit which had just 16 processes running including Arma.

Now with A2 and 4GB RAM, pagefile is suddenly required. The 2GB A2 limit and BIS' own memory management have changed things. Whilst I was sad to re-instate my pagefile, my A2 runs well with it.

I'd like to know what kind of 8GB/12GB setup and usage pattern leads to poorer performance. Maybe you need 16GB for your rendering or number crunching.

[kklownboy]

virtual memory and the paging file, are really not the same thing... But i run into issues sometimes with the page off, so i just let windows do its thing, turning of the page is sooo last decade...

[Mr Fenix]

Hard-discs are 1000's of times slower than RAM at random access. I've got 4GB of DDR3 running at 1.6Ghz and space for a lot more.

Pagefiles archive pages under two circumstances: either Windows thinks you don't need them anytime soon or your task's requirements exceed the physically available RAM.

There are two problems then with using a pagefile (especially a "System Managed" one). First, if you've got more RAM than you need, then there's no point. Second (assuming the first applies to you), the time and resource overhead in managing this function slows your computer down. There's a third issue in that most people have one hard-disc and their pagefile(s) are therefore on the same drive as both Windows _and_ their hog application. This is not clever.

In my work, I deal with people who need more RAM than is physically possible on their hardware and sometimes I make pagefiles on one or more discs up to the maximum of 8GB supported by XP. It's a sad place to be and, whilst their software _runs_ (and produces the data they need), it takes forever.

[Bulldogs]

Sounds like working with accountants "I need the new excell to run on my 386 but I'm not willing to spend more than 5c"

the other point you missed is 32bit access not being able to register more than 2gb of physical ram per application.