Axilian

Glad someone else is noticing the game seems smoother with the patch - thought I was just dreaming

the Community patch is now at version 0064 and so far it's really good - I haven't come across any language issues yet as I believe it doesn't effect localisation (I play in english) and it's really nice to visit places you've visited many times before and suddenly come across new quests. It's comes as did the Xmas patch with exe to apply the patch and one to remove it - this works well so you can actually play sp with the patch , remove it and then go online closed. Weirdly I've also noticed one other thing with my own game is it's appears to be more stable for me (I'm on win 7 x64 , using Elite grapghics and physX - so worse case scenario) with the patch applied

The issue with Elite and win 7 x64 is probably the same as Win 7 x64 and Phys X - the fault appears lie in the way the I/O calls are made in Sacred 2 and in the way an x64 system handles them . Simply it seems in patch 2.43 the I/O was optiimised for XP32 (read the interrupt time was reduced ) without taking into account the extra time it takes to interpret the call from x32 to x64 in a x64 system. This is exasperated when you use elites or physx due to the extra data being handled. Essentially Ascaron's patch programmers = FAIL Btw Elite's / PhysX at patch 2.40 run like a dream on a win 7 x64 sytem (that's with dual ATi Gpus and extra NV card for physX)

Well Tom's Hardware hasn't been the same since Tom Pabst left (someone I met when I worked with BXboards website a long time ago) and to be honest I tend to ignore more of the stuff they put up as the test parameter aren't usually locked down properly. I have to disagree as well about XP64 being a no brainer from a gaming point of view as well having used XP64 (in a multiboot configuration) since it was a beta and also from my own experience working in Games QA. XP64 has got some things going for it but on the drivers side it's a bloody mess. This can cause major issues and as it's a minor OS that has never properly been supported by MS a lot of hardware manufacturers haven't bothered with it (e.g. try finding wireless adapter drivers - very few have xp64 support) For me unless you intend really to stay with kit from earlier than 2008 it's not really worth bothering with Xp64 - it was a pointer to the future though it was more an Experiment than a valid OS for the home user Also the thing with Vista also is a misconception as TH is still obsessed with the state Vista was on it's initial release (I.e. not good). Things have improved a lot since then but TH always seem to want to prove otherwise (it is still slow compared to XP though but not as much as you would believe on the average PC running AV etc at the same time as games) Anyway - I would a little wary of totally eliminating the page file from windows as some programs actually do need it to run - a better idea may be to swap it on it's own partition.

30% difference between winxp64 and win 7 ? - not from my testing it's not - 10% max (I run games with desktop disabled which is easy to set up and in general win 7 drivers have been better optimised than the xp64 ones) However the problem is nothing really to do with the OS it's to do with the amount of data transferral into memory and the speed it's retrieved from the harddisk (including access time and decropression from the Archives ) I run a i7 920 @ 4.0 GHz and HD5870/8800GT(physX ) and still get drops through they are usually in data intensive areas like the Urban areas due to the about of data being swapped into memory. One way of helping is to decompress the text/object archives but this will not totally solve the issue

It could be the memory - It appears that the sacred 2 exe may not be large address aware and therefore can only use 2Gb total . This in reality means that the game will start getting unstable when it start using 1.3Gb and above in taskmanager as it just runs out of memory. This is very similar to what happens in both Fallout 3 and Oblivion when you use large high res texture mods.