Anyone playing with 256mb of ram?

[dandra8]

Hey all, my g/f is having a hard time getting the game to run acceptably on her system. Specs are 2.2ghz p4 256mb ram radeon 9600XT. Now her game chunks so badly she can hardly play, everything is set to it's lowest setting and it still remains unplayable. Now I'm leaning towards a lack of ram issue, as the computer is sending large ammounts of data to the swapfile therefore causing her game to chunk heavily. 1) is there a way to play the game below 1024x768? 2) do you think that running with 512 or 768mb of ram is going to stop her stuttering problem? I don't wanna drop a few hundred dollars if it's not going to work.

[darq787]

The minimum requirements on the box for this says 512MB RAM. I'd suggest 1GB. I don't understand how anyone could have only 256MB RAM these days, basic background window's (XP) processes take up more then half that. Especially with the GFX card you have, doesn't make sense to have a high end GFX card with basically zero RAM, it's not doing anything for you.

Yes that is exactly your problem though, the stuttering is because the game is using virtual memory (AKA your hard drive) to store the stuff it can't fit in RAM, and swapping to and from the HDD is very slow. Bump it up to 1GB and those problems will be completely gone, and with those system specs you can probably run the game with mostly high settings.

Changing to a lower resolution wont help at all.

[molari]

Hey all, my g/f is having a hard time getting the game to run acceptably on her system. Specs are 2.2ghz p4 256mb ram radeon 9600XT. Now her game chunks so badly she can hardly play, everything is set to it's lowest setting and it still remains unplayable. Now I'm leaning towards a lack of ram issue, as the computer is sending large ammounts of data to the swapfile therefore causing her game to chunk heavily. 1) is there a way to play the game below 1024x768? 2) do you think that running with 512 or 768mb of ram is going to stop her stuttering problem? I don't wanna drop a few hundred dollars if it's not going to work.

More RAM is always good. And since the above poster says that the minimum specs do say 512M.....

One other thing to do would be to verify what the AGP settings on your BIOS are (if you know what I mean) - I'm assuming that the Radeon card you mention is AGP. Specifically check the aperture setting and make sure that is not larger than the memory size of the graphics card. With such low system memory you may even want to TRY (note TRY - may be worse so up to you to decide) reducing the aperture to say half your graphic card memory size.

These are my 'old' tweaks so not sure if they will work with your motherboard, BIOS, graphic card, etc. --- USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

[dandra8]

This isn't for my rig, it is for my g/f's which hasn't been updated in quite some time (hence the 256mb of ram). I've already gone through bios agp tweaks and that isn't solving the issue. But I already knew what was going on. Anyone have experience with 512 and this game?. I just bought a gig of kingston hyperX for myself wich was quite pricey, and thus can't afford to drop more cash for more than a 512stick for her. Oh and the 9600XT being a high end card? hehehe just had to laugh about that one (no offense intended).

[darq787]

I should have said "higher end than mine". =) I'm runing an old 9000.

See if you can stick the 512 in there with the 256 (might be 2-3 slots). 512 will work from what I hear, but not "great".

[larsa]

I play on a machine close to (or even lower than) the minimum specs I think, P4 1.7 Ghz, 512 Mb, Geforce FX 5200, Windows XP and the game, well, plays, but anything than well.

It's okay out in the wild or in the refugee camps, but as soon as you come to the mainland you get almost constant disk activity, thus the game's very choppy - especially in or near the towns. I consider the above configuration as the absolute minimum needed to run the game.

Sadly the game could run well even with these configurations if Nevrax had provided more optional graphical elements. But there's no way to reduce the excessive amounts of NPCs or some of the eye candy in the cities or some of the "atmosheric" animations (rain!!!).

[dandra8]

ah well. As long as it's fast enough for her to keep up with me and be effective in a group all shall be well.

[tetsius]

Lates games intended to be ran on medium end systems at least. If your g/f has 256Mb memory she shouldn't play this kind of game, it will only make her frustrated aka LAG, rubberbending, screen jerking ... etc. Share your bought Kingston memory with her if you are her b/f .

[dandra8]

My shiny new set of twinx? no way she'll get her ram on friday.

[chain27]

I have been running on 398 RAM and was chunking almost constantly. Now my Vcard just went out, so I'll be rebuilding a whole new CPU lol