Ram and Large Harddrives 2

[sonic33]

Messed up on the last post...........Pressed the idiot button before I had even put any content in. Derrrrrrr!
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Any way here is my deduction on why Ram and large Harddrives affect performance in Flight Sims.In particular, stuttering.
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I always figured Large hard drives to be the cause of most 'delayed reactions' in Windows. The same as stutters in FS.
Eg: I will always go for two 10 gig rather than one 20 gig. Not just for backup purposes but just because the disk is smaller and the cpu doesn't have to work as hard to get the hdd info into the ram.
If you only have a single large disk you could always partition it (however this will not help with backup if the disk fails)
I would break a 20 gig into three 8gig / 8gig /4gig. Install windows and applications on one 8gig and fs2000/2002 on the other. Use the 4gig for say, downloads etc.....then Move the pagefile / swapfile to the FS partition and make sure it is 1.5 times the size of my physical ram. This will definately stop some of the stuttering as the drive becomes fragmented.
As the Ram becomes full, windows uses what is known as, LRU algorithm, (LRU=Least recently Used.)and uses the least recently used portion of the ram to write the new data into the ram, thus only overwriting data that is probably redundant anyway. Fs scenery is the data in question here and from this deduction it is plain that the more ram you have the more scenery you will see without the hard drive paging. If you look at your hard drive led when the stuttering occurs, you will see it blinking. This is known as paging and is simply writing data from the Hard Drive to the Ram. Ie: the next 100 miles of scenery.
Deduction is:
1.The more ram you have, the more scenery you can see, and paging / LRU will have minimal effect on the running of the Sim.
2. The smaller your drive is, the less work the CPU has to do to retrieve data to the ram.The whole process would take a lot longer if it had to search a 20gig fragmented drive than if it had to search an 8gig. This is one reason why it is good practice to regularly de-fragment your drive.
I think 512 mb of ram would probably hold as much scenery you can see in FS2002 at any one time(Also this is where autogen is good as it saves space on the Ram by not writing scenery that is not necessary.) So I would say that a good base to build on would be 512mb of Ram and an 8 gig (10 max) partition with a 768mb Pagefile on the FS partition. The rest is down to the GPU and CPU. get a good combination of these and you will have a good FS system for a good while.

I tried not to be too techie and hope that those of you that don't already know how this works, can understand it.

Regards.


http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...cd2f5d4903.jpg
69 Original FS2002 Screenshots here
Http://www.shifties.freeserve.co.uk

[an8pilot]

Thanks for that explanation. That realy helps me out alot for i sue my FS2000 to practice with in an HJG DC8 flying the same places I fly in real life on the real DC-8 But can you explain a little more about the below statement? I would like to do that but I don't really know where I would find and implement that in the computer. What is that pagefile / swapfile???? Where do I find it? and how do I move it. How bout a quick talk on how to partition?

.....then Move the pagefile / swapfile to the FS partition and make sure it is 1.5 times the size of my physical ram.

Mike an8pilot@yahoo.com

[sonic33]

I am putting together a complete article on the whole subject as I believe it may help a lot of people who use FS2000 and FS2002.
If I can I will get it up on the main page as a review and if not I will post it as a new thread on the FS2002 Forum ........
Look out for it soon.

Quick answer for you.
You can customise the swap file in Win98, however windows manages it itself and it is not recommended that you alter it. Usually it is the correct size anyway and moving it is very complicated . so in this instance, a 10 gig partition for C:\ drive and install FS2002 on it will suffice and will not need customising.
Windows 2000 and XP however are totally different and you can tweak till your hearts content. I will explain how in my new article comming soon. Also I will cover partitioning.
Soon as I find the time.........

Thanks for the reply.

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...cd2f5d4903.jpg
69 Original FS2002 Screenshots here
Http://www.shifties.freeserve.co.uk

[mith]

Hi Sonic...

I have a pIII 800 and have problems with the "blurry" textures as most are having. I also have 512 megs of memory and a 32 meg gf2 card... I've concluded that the blurryness of the textures have to be CPU related... as I have plenty of Ram.....

I'm bumping up to a 2 ghz system...

Any thoughts?

[sonic33]

You will certainly get massive improvements in performance at 2ghz...........however..........I think the blurred scenery is a problem with the program and not any particular setup. Most people seem to be experiencing it. Maybe MS will fix it in a patch. but consider this......If the scenery becomes crystal clear, will this then effect the performance as it did in FS2000?................I wonder?

Regards
http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...cd2f5d4903.jpg
69 Original FS2002 Screenshots here
Http://www.shifties.freeserve.co.uk