More than four gigs of ram helping with Sacred 2?

[gogoblender 3,077]

Just picked up this post here in SIF:

 

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=58844

 

This is Geezer's answer to it:

 

Performance increase, yes and no. Longer time until problems due to memory leak, certainly yes.

 

Only way to get performance increase with a lot of memory is to use it as a cache for resources that load from disk. Vista and Windows 7 does this with Superfetch but I don't think it is possible for you to force caching of a certain directory (the pak dir f.e.). Superfetch preloads in the background from disk things that is sees you use often. It still needs to load them from disk, so disadvantage with Superfetch is that you can some times get a lot of disk rattling when you reboot and it starts to work in background.

 

But in the end going for a 64-bit OS and lots of RAM is never wrong, because PC is moving towards that anyway. Even next Microsoft Office will be offered in 64-bit versions too, just read that.

 

It's an interesting take...that having more RAM would help with the memory leak...at least extending it for a longer bit of time... Any of the Tech Savy peeps here know if this is true or not? Ram's so cheap right now and nice specials going on at New Egg ^^

 

 

gogo

[Spyrus 0]

Instead of this maybe you could use a run optimizer program (such as the one from the

Tune-Up Utilities 2009 package), which find the 'orphan/invalid' memory pointers and 'clean' them.

 

After playing sacred 2, do you see any increment in memory reserved in application?

I am not, it stays at 400-500 MB, and I have total of 3.25GB (32-bit XP limitation, 2.75 unused for Sacred)

The crash is by writing on invalid data area, most of the times.

There is a limit on memory reserved per application at least on XP < 2GB.

That means that no matter you have xGB of ram , the crash will occur at 2GB used by Sacred.

Though, in my opinion it may need days to consume 2GB.

 

So, either way, no ... but you can eliminating the crashes, by removing the invalid memory often

Edited April 15, 2009 by Spyrus

[stubbie 21]

I think that Spyrus is definitely onto something here from what I have observed on my pc and with my monitoring of the RAM usage.

As he correctly pointed out, when I play Sacred 2 my RAM can get up to 60% usage but as soon as I exit it drops down to about 15%. So I don't think more RAM would fix it.

Rather I think Sacred 2 is trying to access RAM that simply is not available to it.

 

I also have XP 32-bit and 4 gig of RAM installed but only 3.2gig is recognised of coarse.

Another thing that seems to confirm this is that I also get error messages sometimes on exiting Sacred 2 that makes a reference to an invalid memory.

 

So Spyrus when you mentioned this I was very interested;

So, either way, no ... but you can eliminating the crashes, by removing the invalid memory often

 

How does one remove the invalid memory?

 

However with all that being said, I think that extra memory would work but only on a 64-bit OS.

Edited April 15, 2009 by stubbie

[Spyrus 0]

The same behavior will be on 64-bit. Allowing OS to recognize all of our 4GB, does not mean that the game will consume additional memory.

The only thing that might help is the per-application memory allowed. So, if the Sacred 2 COULD break the 2GB barrier then yes

64-bit can give you a headroom.

 

Memory leak you have when you are not freeing ram , as you might know. This is happen on C++ for example, Java is better has the garbage collector.

Invalid memory access you have by bad programming which is the case of Sacred 2.

That means when you free the memory, before checking if someone needs it. And when he needs it -> boom.

 

If the game consumed enough memory, then you would have the windows warning with exclamation (cannot remember the message).

There are applications that can detect invalid memory address (at least on Linux where I am working on).

The optimizers just un-cash the memory that OS has given to the lately used but now closed processes.

 

But, I think that freeing the cached memory is not working as I wrote at previous post about removing the invalid memory.

The OS though does that when the application exits, frees the memory and stop any future access to invalid memory (pointers).

 

So, a workaround is to exit the game more often during playing time. But running the game for a long time, will multiply the possibility

of memory invalid accesses/leaks. A certain code path though will produce the crash. It might not happen for hours...

Edited April 15, 2009 by Spyrus

[gogoblender 3,077]

I"m running sixty four bit vista with 4 gig ram. Spyrus, you think getting more ram could help? Or... do you have an idea of how often just "leaving" the game and then coming back to it will improve performance?

 

 

gogo

[Spyrus 0]

^^ No extra ram is needed.

Leaving application earlier, will reduce the possibility to crash.

But after all, it is a possibility, meaning that it might crash within 10 min or within 10 hours!

 

In order to increase performance, replace you ram with faster or overclock/tweak timings & latency

of the (already enough) 4GB.

For me, since the Sacred 2 consumes 500-600 MB + adding 200-300 MB for the OS,

there you have ~1.1GB minimum requirement for the game to run smooth.

So 2GB for example are high enough. You have 4GB (like me).

Another performance factor will be a faster Hard Disk, Raid 0 or SSD for example

More ram is only useful if running multiple instances of Sacred2 in your machine!

Edited April 16, 2009 by Spyrus

[gial 2]

I concur with Spyrus. More than 4 Gb won't speed up if only running the 1 app. If you are taking videos with fraps at the same time, though, it could help some. This is just speculation, though.

 

But for sheer ram envy, gogo, you *need* the 8 Gb or more. After all, size does matter. My motherboard only supports 8, so that's all I have.

[Tigrul 1]

I've very recently upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB and I haven't observed much of a difference in how Sacred 2 runs. I think it does certain things poorly.

 

My system is:

CPU: Intel Quad Core @ 2.5 GHz (I think this is the weak spot in my system, not certain though)

8 GB DDR3 RAM

1 GB DDR3 Nvidia Graphics Board, dunno exactly what the model is called, GX2 or something like that.

 

In all fairness, I should specify that I'm too stubborn to drop Sacred 2 Graphics below Very High but then again... given the system, I can't accept anything less.

 

(I'm running 64 Vista, btw; it looks like one of the very few OS that can handle 8 GB RAM)

Edited July 11, 2009 by Tigrul

[Schot 407]

One thing I can say about having 64 but and 8GB of ram is that I'm able to run 2 instances of Sacred 2 and record a 5 minute video at the same time. Comes in handy for us insane types.

[Legend Aadil 4]

I have 1GB ram only. It's difficult at times.

I set priority of CPU to highest... I cancel out all other applications as much as possible, and it's ok sometimes, but then after a while, the game starts to slow more and more and eventually is like a near freeze with every movement taking 20 seconds or so.

Will increasing GB in my case be good?

[Stormwing 40]

I'll say 2 gigs should be the bare minimum for some more sleek gameplay. 3 would be great if you're on 32 bit OS. 4 or more would require a 64 bit OS to handle it.

Mine is running quite smoothly now that I jumped from 2 gigs to 4. Some small staggering every now and then but now I have all details in max, save for PhysX as I have Ati's GPU.

[Legend Aadil 4]

Isn't looking great. First time I think I've experienced a memory problem!

My screen crashed, well not the screen, I don't know what happened. The game froze BUT I could still move about, use combat arts or potions or attack things using the cursor, it just didn't move on screen or anything!

I pressed ctrl+alt+delete, and tried clicking back on Sacred 2, then this memory problem appeared, well I don't know what it is!

All colours went weird, and I print screened it fortunately, quickly did it into paint before restarting the PC. It's happened once before, but the application error has never appeared!

 

Will 2GB stop this? Or how do I prevent these screen crashes, or break points?

[Dragon Brother 619]

Never seen that popup before. I would say that yes, more ram would help you out a lot. Fortunately its rather cheap these days to pick up an extra module or two.

[Legend Aadil 4]

Yes, it is, I'm trying to get my Dad to buy it.

It's like around £10 roughly per 1GB memory Stick.

[gogoblender 3,077]

heh, I still got only four gigs^^ I remember buying that system on that day when, all of a sudden, we had decided to get new hardware for the up and coming Sacred 2. At that time, I remember so many peeps saying that the 4 g was over board. Sacred 2 though was a huge hog (huge!) on resources... *cough* still is . But with just that four g ram, and even today, I'm still able to run three instances at once...haven't pushed it any further though

 

 

 

 

gogo

[Legend Aadil 4]

1 run is enough to get my system to the capacity. Hopefully 2GB will reduce the tension

[immagikman 1]

Just something I noticed, With more RAM (in my case 12GB) and more VRAM using 2 GPU's in SLI

I seem to be able to game fine at 2560x1600 with Physx (or however you spell it) enabled, the increased memory seems

to be the only difference between my system and a friends who cannot run Physxs without crashing every 5 minutes.

 

of course I used the 4GB patch on the two executables per instructions I found on the site hre.

Edited September 4, 2011 by immagikman