Strange increase in performance.

[mgovernali]

Hello friends, could you please help me figure out the following. Until now I have been very happy with the performance of my machine and FS9, sliders to the max, gorgeous image, great FPS and so on. Before I go any further however, I should give you my specs. P4 3.2 OVCKD to 3.45, HT 800-FSB. OVCKD ATI X700Pro-256. 2 Gigs ram, 2 S-Ata HDs. FS9 has it's own dedicated HD with just the OS. Now, I have a small utility in my system tray (FreeRam Pro) which not only tells me what my free ram is at all times but it automatecally frees up my ram at preset intervals. The maximum free ram I have always got was 1.64 Gigs after everthing is loaded and ready to go. This was very good as I was saying, until... the other nite I dowloaded a demo of a game called BATTLEFIELD 2. Aside from the fact that it is a great game, it has the unexpected effect to substantially increase my system's performance upon exiting it. At first, I though it was jut a fluke, no, it does it everytime. I run BF2 and when I exit it my system just flies, my free ram jumps up to 1.79, the whole system become much more responsive. I run FS9 right after that and WOW, at least a 10% all around betterment. Now, as most of you know it is ususlly the other way aroud, if you run any other application prior, it will not return of the ram it used back to the system. The question is of course, what does this game do to my system upon exiting to make it faster!? Any ideas guys? It would be interesting to see if you guys get the same results or it is my particlar configuration.
By the way I should mention that the number of running processes does not change from before and after the game.
Thank you very much for any input.
Mark.

P.S. Now, that's a cheap way to increase performance.

[dpc111]

Just a guess but here. I actually went out an bought an additional gig of ram after trying the BF2 demo with everything maxed. My specs are below. With 1 gig, I had bad stutters and pauses. FPS were fine, just pauses etc. I added the additional gig and bingo, smooth, no stutters. I would not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes because common thought is that 2 gigs would not make a big difference over 1 gig on most applications. That being said, all I can think is that in your cause, BF2 is loading up to that level of memory, so when you exits, it frees all the memory the BF was using.

Just a guess though...

Dave
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System Specs:
Athlon64 3500+ ClawHammer @ 2.3mhz
ECS NForce4 A-939 Mobo (1g FSB)
2 Gigs OCZ Performance PC3200 Ram (Dual Channel)
ATI Radeon X800Pro PCI-E 256MB (Catalyst 5.6 @ 520/540)
SoundBlaster Live 24bit
Saitek Cyborg Evo
WinXP SP1

[simaddict]

Correct me if I'm wrong. Don't we want our ram FULL while flyin? Why does everyone look to see how much ram is FREE? To me, free'd up ram is a waste......not being used. If you want free'd up ram, put in 4 gigs of ram, and have 3.5 gigs free!!!!! Am I looking at this wrong? Like I said, correct me if I'm wrong! :)

Harry

[loki]

People are looking at how much RAM is free BEFORE they open FlightSim. The more RAM that is free, the more that FS can grab when it runs.

loki

[mgovernali]

Hi Harry, you are right of course, but, the free ram I was referring to above is at the desktop with system idle right after boot-up and all the services loaded. once I start FS9 the free mem drops down to about 1.1 free (gigs).
I am not quite sure what you mean by "To me, free'd up ram is a waste...", the free ram I am referring to is the portion of the total ram that is still unused upon loading a given program.
Mark

[mgovernali]

Hi Dave, I am not sure if that would be the reason, firstly because I always had the 2 gigs of RAM both before and after the game, also because the number of services loaded before and after BF2 are the same. The very strange thing this game does which I have never seen in 15 years of computing is that it returms back more free memory than it took in the first place. If it is some kind of tweek these people put in this game it would be nice to have that tweek as a standalone utility. I will try to contact the folks at EA Games to see if the can explain this. Thank you. Mark.