More options for slower computers

I'm going to quote an email I got from the folks that made wasteland2 when I reported a bug.

It was a wonderful thing to get such a blunt reply & made me giddy to finally have an excuse to upgrade the box-o-parts I put together seven years prior for something to use with a cheap sticks-o-ram in the empty slots.  64 bit consumer versions of windows have been around at reasonable expense for the better part of a decade, & it's only in the last year or so that games have finally started to be coded to actually make use of more than 4Gigs (3.8 really) of ram.  With only 4 Gigs of memory, you are at the rock bottom of the minimum with a full 50% more ran recommended.  The minimum for video card is a 512meg  DirectX 10.1 Video Card (AMD Radeon HD5x00 Series / Nvidia GeForce 500 Series / Intel4000 or later) with the recommended being  1 GB DirectX 10.1 Video Card , it's possible that you the recommended there is a full double needed to reach the recommended.

 To be honest, those changes you mention will probably not make too much difference for you without adding limitations or diverting resources away from the game & it's great stardock wasn't afraid to code for hardware that was bleeding age a decade ago.

The problem you face is more like in the late 90's when games would often 'work' on a 486, but really needed a pentium or the early 2000's when games quit supporting software acceleration in order to make better use of a focus on the 3d cards in the majority of systems.  Microsoft's extension of support for xp is likely to blame for why x64 took so long to start being supported and actually used in that support. You can get 2x2G for 15-50ish$ on newegg.  You can get a 1Gig video card for about 30$... you really should upgrade considering you can do it for the price of a night out with dinner & movies for two.

Not to be mean, but what exactly are you trying to play on? Core i5s are dirt cheap now days. Unless someone is destitute I have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone not running an i5 and at least 8gb of ram.

I consider my machine a midrange computer as its a core i5-3570k, 16gb ram and a xfx Radeon 6970 (admittedly this video card did cost me $400.00 the year they came out)

I'm unsure how you define destitute, but I have an after-rent income, monthly, of $536 Canadian.

I also already have a 1G graphics card.

I'm wondering if an upgrade to 5G of Ram would help. I could consider that.

FTR I have a core 2 duo CPU E8500 @3.16G

4G of Ram

64 bit Win 7

and the aforementioned 1G Graphics card; which I mainly originally purchased so I could use a dual monitor setup.

I bought this computer, used, a few months ago for $200, and it was at the very high end of what I could afford.

the cpu is fine (I think?), but for various technical reasons, you might need to jump to 6 or 8 gigs ( does anyone still even make 256/512meg sticks?!?!?!).  You would need to open up your computer's case (a trivial matter, consult google on your make & model if you are unsure... but usually it's pretty obvious which screws on a desktop) to see how many empty ram slots you have.  If you have an oem pc (dell/hp/gateway/etc), you can probably lookup the type of memory it uses or call the manufacturer to ask them.  If it's a generic box of parts (which is fine), the ram sticks likely have a sticker/label on them like so & you can probably trade a technical friend a beer to pop one out & read it for you.

If you have empty slots, just buy some proper speed sticks to fill a couple of them (4 slots total with 1-2 filled when built/put together is common ) & give that friend another beer. If you don't have free slots, pick two matching sticks & buy bigger ones to replace them with.  

I picked up a 2Gig R5-200 for like 50$ at a bestbuy a while back, but if you have a gig there it's probably good enough & your trouble is probably simply from lack of system ram causing windows to use the exponentially slower hard drive to swap bits of the game's memory in & out constantly to fake it.  

Usually unless you are buying expensive ram to to huge size needs to expensive enterprise class stuff (~50-100++$ usd) it makes sense to just fill the empty slots with 10-20$/stick ram since you will already  already have the box open.  If you installed the video card itself, you are probably fine installing the ram yourself

eh thats a dirt old processor. Still for this type of game I would think it should be suitable. Ram is probably the bigger issue. I advise running 8 gigs minimum if you can manage it. I run Win 7 64 bit. And at idle right now according to one of my usage tools I am sitting at 2.875gb used, and 13.07gb free. I then loaded up a 201 turn in prograss game as the yor with a huge galaxy, all the current civs in, and all other settings at normal. Once the game loaded before I even did anything I looked at my usage. Currently sitting at 7.92gb of ram used on the system.

If I only had 8gb of ram instead of the 16 I am running I would be almost to using the page file on the computer. Which a page file is SOOOOOOOOOOOO SLOW if you didn't know. So I believe the above poster is right (though I still think that cpu is too old personally) the primary problem you are probably running into is just a total lack of ram.

TLDR version: get at least 8gigs of ddr3 ram, you need it for this game. (edit: if you can afford it and the mb supports it I would go 12 or 16gb or ram so you can play at least huge galaxies with more then 5 ai)

Though as the game gets closer to completion memory usage may come down, but it might not also.

I'm good with hardware, its affording the new ram that would be the problem. 6 I could afford; but likely not this month (that being january in terms of budgeting) but it feels wrong to just abandon two of my 1G sticks, as shouldn't I be able to sell them?

I've never used gskill I buy Coursair but heres 8gb of ddr3 (2 4gig sticks) for $65.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231689

This also has the benefit of letting you add 2 more later on down the road should you want to go to 16gb.

Thats assuming your Motherboard supports ddr3 though, I dont remember the specs of the Mboard for the core duos. If it only supports ddr2 you are looking at 3 times that price for the ram.

craigslist, ebay.  But 1G sticks are pretty cheap

it is DDR3

In addition, I paid close attention to my ram using resource monitor; I never got above 3. The game slowdowns were associated with a few things that I dealt with by...

turning on quick move

turning off autosave

The only other slowdowns where when unique tiles were revealed, like crystals, or anomalies, etc. 

These suggested options obviously work for slower and faster computers.


Planet tile size bonus  -5 to +5
(Less planets, less processing but bigger initial output to make up for it, makes the terraforming tech line less useful however.)

^
I'd like this in anyway for really big galaxies to save on micromanagement.

Along with 2 further settings for how many stars and planets spawn in the galaxy, one on each end of the scale past abundant etc, less than rare etc.

Thats all well and good, but bear in mind that the system will always hold some ram in reserve for itself. The more important thing to watch for in your case is to see how much of the page file it is using. Since everytime it uses the page file it is having to manually write info to your hard drive for the game to pull from later. this is easily over 100x slower then ram transfer rates. So my suggestion still stands unless you are seeing 0 page file usage.

 

I'm pretty sure I am. System Monitor tells me I have 4G of RAM and that's exactly what I have... but it does not tell me what's going on with the page file. Is there any specific way I can detect this?

This is what I have running in the corner of my 2nd monitor. At any time it tells me cpu usage, what cores are doing usage wise, how much rame is used in both numbers and %, and what % of a page file is being used. (My machine doesnt have a page file, its recommended to disable this usually when running higher amounts of ram)

http://addgadgets.com/all_cpu_meter/

It tells you that you have 4 G of ram, but it can only use so much for nonessential stuff.  just sitting idle, windows uses around 600-800megs or so of ram.  Those numbers go up fast when you start making it load directx, positional audio, and the game stuff itself.If you have a second monitor (or some other more technical things), you can watch resmon, but at the end of the day 4096 Megs (4G) is only 2/3 of the recommended 6144Megs (6G), only managing to just hit the minimum

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007611%20600006066%20600006126&IsNodeId=1&name=DDR3%201333%20%28PC3%2010600%29

2x2G for 35$ assuming the right speed

After more playthroughs I am now convinced the problem is in fact related to certain things being on the page file.

Is there any way I can tell my computer to use the paging file more sparingly? 

Also

Curious for more info about RAM.

Right now I have 4 slots. They look sort of like this, where X is a slot, and the -'s are just there to indicate space between.

X-X---X-X

I've been told twinning ram is a good idea. IE if I have a 1G stick, I should "pair" it with another 1G stick. I presume this is why the slots are in sets of 2.

Right now each slot has 1G in it. I am wondering what the pluses and minuses of the following setups are...

1-1---1-1 (current)

this is 4 total. The minuses are outlined above, frankly. 

2-1---1-1

This is 5 total, but breaks the pairing rule. I could afford this but frankly, it might be pointless.

4-1---1-1

Might be on the edge of what I can afford, but I might be able to do it. The question is, is the above better or is...

X-4---1-1

This, which leaves one slot blank, does not violate the "twin" rule; is it thus better than the above?

128-1---1-1

Okay this would be crazy imbalanced; but I'm wondering how it would compare to...

128-X---X-X

Which would feel odd leaving so many blank spaces

Yes, get more RAM so the computer doesn't need to use the page file. That's the only way. Otherwise you're game is just going to crash on you because of insufficient memory, as the page file is only used as a last resort. If you have an extra $500/month to play with, you shouldn't have any problems getting more RAM, it's not that expensive. Just make a few compromises for a month and you could easily get yourself 8 or more gigs. As for selling your old RAM, forget about it, you won't get squat for it. There's simply on resale value for it as new sticks are so cheap these days.

thenewteddy,

Please specify your motherboard. Because you might be going the wrong way. As far as i recall the only (E8500 LGA775) motherboards that support DDR3 are the ones with the intel G41M chipset.

If so then the following is very important: those motherboards (that i know of) use a combination of a DDR2 dual channel and a DDR3 dual channel. This means that in prime set (most likely dimm1 and dimm3) you must place identical DDR2 memory sticks and in the second set (possibly dimm2 and dimm4) you must place a set of DDR3 sticks. Furthermore the G41M chipset is only guaranteed to function properly when both sets are populated at only one memory speed (i believe 800MHz - without overclocking) and when the size of the memory sticks in the prime set are greater or equal than the sticks in the second set.

From you post the memory layout appear to be currently:

DIMM1: DDR2 1GB
DIMM2: DDR3 1GB

DIMM3: DDR2 1GB
DIMM4: DDR3 1GB

In dual channel memory layout there is only one situation in which a motherboard might function with an odd number of memory sticks; and that is when only DIMM1 is populated. So three memory sticks will not work.

To get to 6GB you should get two (identical) DDR2 2GB for DIMM1 and DIMM3 and leave the current sticks in DIMM2 and DIMM4; Get the same speed (and type) as the ones currently in DIMM1/3.

To get to 8GB you should get two (identical) DDR2 2GB for DIMM1 and DIMM3 and get two (identical) DDR3 2GB for DIMM2 and DIMM4 (all of the same speed). If your motherboard supports it you could go for two (identical) DDR2 4GB for DIMM1 and DIMM3 and leave DIMM2 and DIMM4 empty.

DIMM1 must always be populated, so you can not go for just two DDR3 sticks of 4GB in DIMM2 and DIMM4.

The G41M chipset supports only upto 8GB, so trying to go beyond that is pointless (if it works at all).

But the most important advise that i can give you: Check your motherboard specs.

No. not without adding more ram, and even then no not really.  Nor would you want to...

• during times of relative low;/idle i/o, windows will copy data out of ram to the pagefile & keep both.  This is done because when you suddenly need more space in ram, such as to load & play a video, manage a colony, build a ship design, etc when the memory involved in things like holding the map/ai data is not immediately important it doesn't need to put everything on hold while it copies stuff to the page file to make room for something new because it can simply dump the data in ram  to make room for stuff that's actively performing i/o operations on the memory.  thwarting that behavior would make matters worse (significantly so).

This whole discussion is starting to border on absurd though. Ok, you can't afford two sticks of reasonable size right now this month... Put the money on the shelf & buy them next month, or the month after next.    Even making use of the best sale price on galcivIII, the game alone costs as much (or more) than an upgrade that will get you to the minimum requirements.  You don't need to upgrade right now. The success of steam sales & common occurrence of "oh god, you know how many games I have in my steam library that I never even installled? because 4$ was too easy for an interesting looking game I might play later" > "yea, every once in a while I'll get bored and take one for a spin, I don't have to feel bad if a 5$ game isn't what I hoped" type conversations. GalCivIII will still be here in a month or two when you can afford an upgrade, hell... it might even be out of beta & more enjoyable with your shiny new pc-bling!

I was thinking of going up to 16 gigs myself from 8. Ram goes through phases of being cheap or expensive relative to supply and demand, I was wondering if people think it cheap or expensive at the minute relatively?

For slower computers, as I found out in my modding experiments, one thing you can manually do is reduce the resolution of all event pictures, I am not sure if you can do this for icons etc but it might help.

 

My roommate has 16 & has said that he was disappointed the only time it gets used is when he loads up a few monster vms in the background with a big chunk of ram but low cpu needs

When changing memory sticks to mixed sizes you MUST check with the mother board manufacturer for which slot to put which size. It often isn't intuitive.

A game is an app.  Any app has a reasonably fixed memory demand.  Games tend to dominate your UI (mouse, screen) and attention, so you can't realistically run multiple games at a time (or even a game + anything else productive).

In research or some work environments, you can tackle (or be stiff-armed by) problems that just scale up without bound.  (You can twist this into a good thing; it lets you justify serious hardware for, um, your work.  Yup yup.)

• CAD/CAM feature recognition
• machine learning (and Netflix-like challenges therein)
• various AI problems
• image recognition / image processing
• Big Data

Then that 8-core with 16 or 32 GB, and quad Nvidia graphics cards running CUDA, all count as necessary research tools.  (You laugh, but someday you'll realize -- it's actually true, and it's still not enough.  Then you cry.)

Obviously, if you're a dev, you "need" the best hardware just to recompile your code in the background .  Gently remind them of this in your next interview.

I think until the steam system survey averages start showing a significantly higher % of users with 8G of ram or more (currently looks ~40%, numbers quoted below) and staying that way for a good time, we won't really see games wanting >8G of ram..  Games are just starting to actually use 64bit capabilities & only recently started crossing the 3.8G memory limitation (look at skyrim with all its vaunted high memory needs people complained about).

• First we will see stuff like when galcivII only turned on certain ai algorithims on multicore processors or user seeking out a checkbox for games start start making use of large amounts of memory.
• at some point we will see standardized expectations becoming more and more common that games require 4/6/8G min, but add extra stuff to memory if it's available at recommended spec sizes.

System RAM

 

 

-0.06%

Less than 512 MB

0.01%

-0.01%

512 Mb to 999 MB

0.22%

0.00%

1 GB

2.12%

+0.03%

2 GB

10.07%

+0.13%

3 GB

14.00%

-0.12%

4 GB

21.63%

+0.04%

5 GB

1.42%

0.00%

6 GB

6.13%

-0.07%

7 GB

2.42%

+0.11%

8 GB

28.98%

-0.06%

9 GB

0.08%

+0.01%

10 GB

0.29%

-0.01%

11 GB

0.12%

-0.01%

12 GB and higher

12.50%

-0.03%