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Hi all.

I have some questions about the game engine. Or maybe not questions but some kind of thoughts that came to me during last week. I have Windows XP, and since this is 32bit system I can't use high textures in game. That's somewhat weird to me. On my PC that I use to play WoT there are only 2 GB RAM but the GPU have 1 GB RAM. So i don't have a problem using high textures in other games, like  Max Payne 3, and they works flawlessly. I know that Win XP recognize only 2 GB of RAM so i don't expand it 'till I feel urgent need to change system.

I found a way to edit settings file that allowed me to change textures to high, but... Levels loading took sometimes so much time, then when I finally arrive onto battlefield I was either dead or disconnected, so I must reconnect to the server again. The Arty mode sometimes was unbearable due to low fps. Game crashes almost every five or so games. So I changed back to medium textures and game works fine - no crashes, no low fps, no freezes. The Red Screen Of Death is still present, but well... And I know that textures are proceeded by GPU. In most games 1 GB RAM on it is enough if not even too much. So why I have a feeling that a way this game uses resources of my PC is abnormal? I think that this engine is broken in many defferent ways. This is no high end game (graphically) like Crysis 2 (BTW - I have flawless gameplay in that game too on almost max settings, of course without dx11 super textures). So WHY? Or maybe there is a way to load high textures on XP without problems above?

Suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers.
Edited by 4RoAPestilence, 27 June 2012 - 03:24 AM.

game engine is bad it leaks memory and it works best on dual i heard

Most likely the game is partially on your page file as it doesn't fit completely in the memory. Most likely this page file is located on a normal harddisk (= low IOPS)
Try using a SSD(= high IOPS) and set the page file to be on that harddisk and you'll load much faster.
Not sure if readyboost works on windows XP, but if that works you could use an USB-stick which is readyboost compatible and make that active. That way you will also decrease load times (not as much as with an SSD, but it's much faster).

Also installing the game on that SSD/USB-stick will decrease the load time a lot.
Edited by jerrycan, 27 June 2012 - 03:35 AM.

 jerrycan, on 27 June 2012 - 03:34 AM, said:

I have two partitions. Game is installed on second so system have it's own. Swap files are on both partitions and they are in size recommended by XP (around 3 GB). I know that there is a limit of data transfer between these two partitions (around 30 MB) but this cannot be a problem, cause like I told before no other game works that bad on high details. The idea of SSD/USB stick is good but I want permanent solution without periferals.
Edited by 4RoAPestilence, 27 June 2012 - 03:45 AM.

 4RoAPestilence, on 27 June 2012 - 03:15 AM, said:

Windows xp can recognize from 3.3 to 3.7gb of ram depending on your hardware compatibility and choices.

Which cpu do you have, could be it simply takes ages for it to process high textures during loading.

SSD is about as permanent as it gets, it gets inside your computer just like a normal harddrive. The problem doesn´t seem to be in transfer rate between partitions, rather it´s in tranfer rate bewteen your HD and memory. Part of your game is in swap file, and it needs to swap parts of the game to swap and back to keep the currently executing part in memory if you use high quality textures.

I have no idea why WOT i bigger in memory than max payne (You could check it, task manager shows memory usage. Just put the high textures back on). Maybe it uses better quality textures? But if the problem is memory, about the only non-hardware solution is to kill every unneeded process in task manager before playing and hope it frees up enough memory (not very likely). Jus buy 2gb of extra ram and be happy, XP uses up to about 4gb.
Edited by Vedenhenki, 27 June 2012 - 05:58 AM.

Actually, regular 32bit WinXP can see 2^32 bytes of memory, but other hardware needs a way to adress its memory somehow and that has to fit inside that 32bit region. So you can get in a really strange situations -  like before I installed 64bit version of Win7 on my job laptop, the 32 bit Win7 could only utilize 2.99 GB of RAM while having 4 GB

(feel free to correct me if I'm wrong )

As much as I understand it 32bit systems can only handle 4gb of data at once so f. e. having a graphics card with alot of RAM (1gb for example) actually cripples your system even further because it takes 1gb away from that 4gb pool leaving even less for the system and page file. Other devices like dvd, hdd, cpu, each of them has their own cache memory (although not that much) that also uses up the 4gb limit the system can adress at once.

Don't know if the 32bit-ness is at fault here but as a Win7 64bit user I can only tell you that I'm having crashes maybe once in a week or so...

As i stated before windows xp 32bit can see from 3.3-3.7 gb of ram depending on hardware. This is tested and proven, in most extreme cases we managed to get it to recognize up to 3.8 gb but windows didnt last long after all the tweaking.
Edited by dvoridex, 27 June 2012 - 08:17 AM.

Hello. I'll try to explain in English though it's not my native language.

XP is a 32-bits system (though there's a 64-bis version).  As said previously it can only deal with 3.23 (or little bitmore) GB of RAM and cannot deal the full 4GB of RAM one can have on a PC.
Only 64 bits OS can deal with 4GB and more.
And ReadyBoost does not work with XP or  32 bits systems for the same reason: it creates a virtual pagefile.sys of 4 Gb... that XP is unable to use.

I play both on a laptop and a PC.
Le first one is under Vista (nobody's perfect) 32 bits and 4 GB of RAM. I do have a lot of lag (playing wireless too: all the chances are by my side... ) and quite often this *@!#* ! Red Screen. And I tried Readyboost too. Not good  => It creates far too much lag and the laptop finally works better without...

The PC is under Windows 7 64 bits and with 8GB of RAM. => NEVER had any problems... Just a few brutal returns to desktop without warning since patch 7.4. But nothing really disturbing.

IMHO: if you have the opportunity of upgrading your system to a 64-bits system, that will probably make most of your problems vanish.
And I agree SSD decreases A LOT the loading time.

After it's up to you (and you wallet) to decide what to do  

I have the same set up and my settings are low to medium... Players with new computers i7 and alike suffer from same problems...

XP has a limit of 4 GB RAM, http://msdn.microsof...mits_windows_xp

Edit...
Dam!!! I'm to slow...

Edit...
Buying new PC, more RAM and Windows 64 bit wont fix the bug in WoT, but you wont see it... I restart the game every two hours and if I land on Dragon Ridge, first think I do is checking for red screen as counter gets to 00:00. I then still have time to restart and get back in battle...
Edited by EickhardtSr, 27 June 2012 - 08:57 AM.

Thank You all. I will buy some more RAM and if that will not help me I will finally change my OS. But I still think that this is not fault of my current system specifications (Max Payne 3, Crysis 2 works great).