If you had access to 4GB memory, what would you do with it?

[Dr. Ffreeze]

Hello All,

I am a bit disappointed with the way memory is used in Windows boxes. WinXP is much better then Win98 but still, I don't think that oodles and oodles of memory gets used to full effect. I blame both WindowsXP and program developers. Well, blame is kinda harsh, but dang it I want see a performance increase when I have 2GB or more of memory! =)

Games are one of the applications where they can many times run in "exclusive mode". I just made that term up, but when I am playing a game, I don't really need it to share resources with other programs like Internet Explorer. So the FPS map I am playing only has 237MB of textures, I HAVE 2GB of memory. Go ahead and load up the between map interface, the quick save, the next cutscene, and the next 2 maps into memory! Never touch that evil virtual memory on my HD, EVER.

Anyway, if you had 4GB in your system what would you do to gain maximum performance? I want to hear all the ideas. I really wish someone would make a $40 IDE card that had no IDE connectors, just memory slots. =)

Any ideas?
Dr. Ffreeze

PS. I really liked the option in Serious Sam 2 that pretouched all textures in the game. I would guess that this loaded many of them into memory to cache them.

 

[Tagrineth]

Simple:

If you have 4GB, make a 2GB RAM drive, and put your swap file on it. Bang, you're done.

 

[Rodéric]

Re: If you had access to 4GB memory, what would you do with

Windows... well not the best OS around.

"exclusive mode" exist in DirectX doc, so you didn't make up that term

The virtual memory in a good OS is used to swap unused/cached data (programs...), and therefor must be accessed even when you don't 'need' it.
The OS will put recently used programs into it, so they'll load faster next time. (Talking about BeOS, don't know windows too much)

Well well... you see games are made with a system in mind, if you're way above it... well it can't help sorry...

plenty of memory... I'll have 5 or 6 VS.Net launched, IRC client, BeShare, ICQ, winamp 2.x, mozilla, 6 or 7 explorer (not ie), calculator, notepad, Ultra Edit...
Oh wait... everything fits my 512MB ^^

 

[Miksu85]

I have 256 MB on my machine, and using 98lite I was able to shrink Windows 98 installastion to 80 MB. Then I got this crazy idea to make completely CD-bootable windows, but I run into problems because CD was read-only. Then I got idea to load windows from CD to ramdisk, and as my suprise it runned exterely fast. (there was 150 MB RAM available to windows, while ramdisk was 100 MB). I simply made bootable CD which boots to DOS, then autoexec.bat creates ramdisk and loads windows directory there, then win.com is executed on ramdisk and that's it!
It's very fast because when OS is completely in RAM, it doesnt't have to touch disks at all, and it can read files in a less than nanosecond because there is no mechanical parts included when reading and writring to ramdisk.

So if I had 4 GB RAM I'd definetly made my XP to run from ramdisk, with 256 MB it's pretty problematic though

 

[CosmoKramer]

Ehum...if you have X GB of memory just disable Virtual Memory. Problem solved.

 

[asicnewbie]

My workplace has 1 (Linux) PC with 4GB of PC133 SDRAM. At the time, (late 2001), RAM-prices were relatively cheap, and the 4GB of Crucial PC133 SDRAM was only $800. (Compare that with $10k for Sun Blade 1000 4GB RAM kit!)

Funny thing is, only 3.5-3.8GB of that 4GB RAM is actually visible to the system. I think the PCI and AGP peripherals share the same 32-bit memory-address space, so the PCI/AGP base-address windows mask-out some of the system-RAM. We use the PC to run (ASIC) chip simulations.

Sadly, though, most of our linux apps (Cadence, Synopsys) will not use beyond 2GB per process. I think Synopsys includes a command-line switch to go beyond 2GB, but the company strongly discourages it.

 

[horvendile]

Ehum...if you have X GB of memory just disable Virtual Memory. Problem solved.

I think many (some) programs require you to have virtual memory, regardless of how much RAM you have.

 

[Tagrineth]

Simple:

If you have 4GB, make a 2GB RAM drive, and put your swap file on it. Bang, you're done.