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-

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.