Any problems with 1 Mb RAM?

[Sea Demon]

Anybody running the game with the minimum of 1 Mb of RAM? Any issues or problems encountered?

[LukeFF]

1 meg? :huh:

[TDK1044]

Assuming you mean 1 GIG, then it would depend on other factors such as video card and processor. As a rule though, SH4 really needs 2 GIGs of RAM to perform at the highest graphical settings.

[Vlad34]

Seriously, this game is a RESOURCE hog! Especially if you intend to run most if not all of these wonderful mods. 1 GB is just simply not enough for most games nowdays most importantly SH4. Go over to www.newegg.com (http://www.newegg.com) and see what you can pick up, generally you can find memory deals that are astounding, and most of all, if you have a decent system and decent video card then don't go cheap by trying to skimp by on only 1 gig of RAM. Hope you find this helpful and Newegg is just my personal favorite so I'm not trying to sell you on them or anything....:D

[Sea Demon]

Assuming you mean 1 GIG, then it would depend on other factors such as video card and processor. As a rule though, SH4 really needs 2 GIGs of RAM to perform at the highest graphical settings.

Yes, I meant 1 GB. Woops. :oops:

[MONOLITH]

Hold on....

I'm doing great with 1 gig of ram. And only a P4 2.4 Ghz cpu.

My savior may be my X1950 Pro video card, but it still means 1 gig of ram is okay.

I have all my settings cranked to max, at 1680x1050. I get 50 fps interiors, and 30 outside, which is more than fine.

[Sea Demon]

Hold on....

I'm doing great with 1 gig of ram. And only a P4 2.4 Ghz cpu.

My savior may be my X1950 Pro video card, but it still means 1 gig of ram is okay.

I have all my settings cranked to max, at 1680x1050. I get 50 fps interiors, and 30 outside, which is more than fine.

I was just wondering because I have 1 Gb RAM, and I have long load times, and when I quit the game, it takes about 45 seconds to 1 minute before my desktop comes into view. I don't know why this happens.

In game, I get a few stutters, and it takes a few seconds to switch from the interior of the submarine to the bridge for example. I was wondering if my low RAM specs were mostly reponsible for these things.

BTW, I have a GeForce 6800 with 256, and P4 2.4 cpu.

[mrbeast]

I have only 1GB ram (actually 1024MB) and P4 3.4Ghz with Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB card, runs very smoothly.

[maerean_m]

I was just wondering because I have 1 Gb RAM, and I have long load times, and when I quit the game, it takes about 45 seconds to 1 minute before my desktop comes into view. I don't know why this happens.

In game, I get a few stutters, and it takes a few seconds to switch from the interior of the submarine to the bridge for example. I was wondering if my low RAM specs were mostly reponsible for these things.

With 2 gb of ram it takes a second for the desktop to reappear, the load times are better and the switching between stations is instantaneous.

While playing in the career, SH4 uses 1.3 gb of ram. So 1 gb of physical ram is not enough. Windows has to seriously use the swap file.

[MONOLITH]

Sea Demon, in terms of your slow loading times, and what I call "Ram unloading" while you wait for the desktop to return, yes, that's directly and specifically related to the RAM. More Ram would speed that up.

But specifically to playing SH4, I do fine with 1 gig. Maerean_m's post above maybe correct about the 1.3 G Ram, but my game does play fine. It takes me a moment as well to go from inside to outside while the exterior textures load, but it's not a game killer for me.

[Gunner]

And lets not forget fellas, XP is a resource hog as well, 2GB over 1MB is cheapest way to upgrade your box an see an instant performance increase. :arrgh!:

[THE_MASK]

Its the graphis card that runs the game . The other stuff helps .

[AVGWarhawk]

I ran it with 1 gig without issue. When I added the second gig I notice a switch from station to station was much faster. The magnifying of the navigation map was much quicker in both directions. I can TC now up to highest and it is still smooth. It does help with game play.

[leovampire]

Is if you match up your virtual memeory manualy to the same as your physicle memory.

So if you have 2gb physicle set the virtual to 2gig's as well.

This game slowly eat's it all up especialy if your window's program dosn;t make the ram release on it's own. So little by little it will slow down over time playing it.

[MONOLITH]

Its the graphis card that runs the game . The other stuff helps .


This is a big generalization that varies widely from game to game.

Some games are VPU heavy, some games are CPU heavy.

SH4 is a bit of both. The reason that the game stutters during TC, is because of all the CPU processing of all the entities on the game world. At that time there's ZERO drain on your video card.

Like AVG stated, RAM helps enormously during CPU heavy cycles, like TC.

[klh]

I also am doing fine with 1GB of RAM (on a 3.0 GHz machine with a 7600GT).

To help matters, I use a utility called FSAutoStart to unload all but the critical items from RAM, leaving me with over 700 MB of RAM to run SH4. It is slow to start and exit as some have said, but that's not a real problem. I have all the graphics options checked except for post-processing filter.

[SteamWake]

It will be an issue if hes running vista.

[MONOLITH]

I have a couple other things working in my favor as well. I have two seperate drives, with the game on one, and the OS on the other.

I have a large Virtual memory/paging file on each.

I defrag both drives probably once a day.

In my bios setup, i have the drives set to maximum speed (as opposed to 'quiet' setting).

I use a program called "end it all" before I play. It finds and stops almost all running processes in the background except the bare minimum. Even when you think there is nothing running, it finds and shuts down 27 out of 30 running processes, freeing up a lot of cpu and ram.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,697,00.asp

My X1950 Pro easily handles the graphics load, everything above helps out with the cpu processing.

I'd still rather have 2 gigs of ram though.

I will on my next rig. :|\\

[leovampire]

I found a guy who was having problems with the ROW mod we made. Way to low FPS.

Well after going over his set up found out he was running the mother board for the speakers on his system.

I told him to get an actual sound card and use that instead and once he did it and got back to me found out the game was working a lot better.

The mother board will use your ram to run the sounds so a sound card is also a must.

[odjig292]

I've been running on 1GB P4 3.2 Gh with an ATI 1550 512MB and getting along okay but haven't been pushing the graphics in order to enjoy the game. I also have two hard drives with the virtual memory on the unused one. However, I wondered why it took so long to get the desktop back. Thanks for the tip on "end-it-all".

[swuboo]

I have only 1GB ram (actually 1024MB) and P4 3.4Ghz with Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB card, runs very smoothly.
1,024 megabytes is exactly one gigabyte. Just as a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes. It's based on powers of two, not ten.

[Laffertytig]

Is if you match up your virtual memeory manualy to the same as your physicle memory.

So if you have 2gb physicle set the virtual to 2gig's as well.

This game slowly eat's it all up especialy if your window's program dosn;t make the ram release on it's own. So little by little it will slow down over time playing it.

how do u do this?

[leovampire]

Is if you match up your virtual memeory manualy to the same as your physicle memory.

So if you have 2gb physicle set the virtual to 2gig's as well.

This game slowly eat's it all up especialy if your window's program dosn;t make the ram release on it's own. So little by little it will slow down over time playing it.

how do u do this?

Right click on my computer then click on properties at the bottom. Then click on the Advanced tab at the top. The line that says Performance then "visual effect's processing and so forth" click on the settings button. Then click on the tab "Advanced" at the bottom you will see a line that says "Virtual memeory" click on change button Choose the hard drive you want to add virtual memory to then highlite the custom size circle. The inicial size can not be smaller than 2mb I have mine at 250mb but the maximum size I make the same as my physicle memory installed. After your done hit the set button then okay and you have to restart your PC for it to take effect.

I hope I did this easy enough for you to understand.

[thefretmaster]

:lol: Running full speed ahead no problems on my laptop http://lowendmac.com/pb/portable.shtml








lol sorry just had to add this :know: :arrgh!: (dont have a go at me, it took me ages to find a computer with those specs! :yep: )

[panzer 49th]

Im running on 1 gig of ram and it is very laggy for me.

Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop

Intel Centrino Mobile

ATI Mobility Raedon X300

18.9 gig's of ROM left

Windows XP Home Edition SP2

1 Gig of RAM

I need to upgrade I think but I do not have the money to upgrade it yet if anyone has suggestions for what I should get please tell me.

[thefretmaster]

tbh its probably your graphics card causing you the issue, most players have trouble with the x600 ati so the x300 isnt going to fare that well im afraid.
also if you are serious about playing the game (or others) then id suggest getting a desktop rather than a laptop

[panzer 49th]

If you can donate the money for one I am ok with that:lol:

But in the meantime I have a lot of saving of money to do.

[stinger503]

I don't know if its the RAM or not but when I start a mission it sort of freezes when i try to:
Go to Map screen
Zoom out
Zoom in
Move map around
Go to deck
Going near land

If i'm playing music the part I'm listening to will start replaying over and over. But luckily after I do everything once it doesn't lag anymore.

It did this in SH3 but not as bad as SH4

[leovampire]

I don't know if its the RAM or not but when I start a mission it sort of freezes when i try to:
Go to Map screen
Zoom out
Zoom in
Move map around
Go to deck
Going near land

If i'm playing music the part I'm listening to will start replaying over and over. But luckily after I do everything once it doesn't lag anymore.

It did this in SH3 but not as bad as SH4

A few people that were having problems with ROW where using the mother board for sound and as soon as they got sound card's the game ran a lot better for them because the mother board uses the CPU and ram to play sounds.

[SilentOtto]

I knew that about the sound card, but since mine was a little old, and I have recently upgraded the motherboard to a new one with flashy 6.1 sound and all, I gave it a try... (maybe) not surprisingly, I checked 10-12 more FPS using a 6 yr old SB Live!, always. Integrated sound is only good for "marginal" use, never for 3d multichannel sound. The CPU gets the load then, and in this kind of sims we cannot afford that!

Apart from that I agree the video card is crucial, more than RAM. But then RAM is also important, and CPU, and speedy HDs...

With a fast box you won't notice the 1-2GB difference _that_ much. I know I didn't when I finished my step-by-step upgrade (ram was last). On the other hand, with a slow box, anything you improve you will notice inmediately!

my 2 bit$...

[-Pv-]

As you have discovered, everyone has their own version of good advice. This is because everyone owns a unique set of hardware and skill varies widely on optimizing that hardware set. You have to take a bit of what everyone says and try it out on your system to see what makes a difference for you. Every Main Board model has it's own unique advantages/disadvantages for manipulating memory, disk I/O etc.

My last bit of self-serving advice is after all your tweaks are done, the hardware is the limiting factor. The less RAM you have, more more careful and aggressive you have to be to make as much of it avialble to the game as possible. When you have 2 gig or more, it's less important to clear out programs as long as the ones you leave in aren't using CPU.

More RAM (both video and system) and faster CPU/GPU will provide the most noticable results. Depending on your tweaking skill the game will definately run on 1 gig on your video card, but if you want faster, smoother, you have a way to go both in tweaking and hardware to truely get unfettered performance on XP or Vista with SH4.

MONOLITH,

From my experience, with 2 gigs or more of SYSRAM, SH4 does almost no HD caching when you have 512 VRAM. All that daily defragging is only waring out your HD prematurely. Also, if you START with a defragged cache file, it does not frag over time because the system has reserved a continuous disk space for it. You can do two things to verify my claim. Watch your HD light while playing the game and keep the Task Manager Performance Tab accessible behind the game and task switch to it once in a while.

-Pv-

[jazman]

I'm the guy with a dead video card. So, crazy as I am, I just want to look around in the game, so I installed it on my second computer. It has an AMD 2400+, 1.25 GB of RAM.

I had the same problem. Clearly it's a RAM issue, because that desktop coming back so slowly (me, too!) means it was paged out (to the Pagefile / swapfile) because of aggressive RAM freeing, and is getting paged back in. Same with other programs. The delay between the command room and the map and the bridge is there--things have to get paged out to make more RAM for SH4.

So the tips on clearing out all the programs you can is good. When you have a list of programs, any that _don't_ sleep and stay in sleep mode (meaning, they just sit there, doing absolutely nothing), will need to get paged in. That's disk I/O, and it's slow. Then it'll get paged out again, because Windows is short on RAM and is aggressive about paging out stuff.

Programs that don't sleep: firewalls, anti-virus, system monitoring, email, browser on ESPN's scores page, etc. Do you really know what every single background service is doing? Clear 'em ALL out.


OK, I did that on my machine. Things are a lot snappier, relatively speaking. I can alt-tab out of SH4 and the desktop is right there. So you probably can get away with 1 GB of RAM, if you clear out as many programs as you can.