Increase virtual memory size for better performance

[drsafety]

ON lower end machines, this may help improve frame rates.

I upped mine from 1024 max to 2500 megs and this helped noticeably (less hard drive thrashing in game)

noobs: go to control panel, system, advanced tab to increase virtual mem size

 

[userlain]

Too bad there will be more harddrive thrashing.

Virtual memory uses a page file on the harddisk like it would RAM. So when you run out of ram, the game starts accessing your harddisk like mad. Whereas, harddrive transfer is significantly slower than system RAM you will get crummy performance.

 

[Sadan01]

ON lower end machines, this may help improve frame rates.

I upped mine from 1024 max to 2500 megs and this helped noticeably (less hard drive thrashing in game)

noobs: go to control panel, system, advanced tab to increase virtual mem size

Out of interest, how much physical ram do you have in your machine to begin with?

 

[1c0n]

i dont think there will be MORE thrashing persay... just more HD available TO thrash if it needs too... though its safe to assume, Civ 4 in this state is like anything MS makes, if you give it, it will use it. lmfao

 

[auldian]

drsafety
One old technique for reducing the harddrive grinding is to make the minimum and maximum the same. That means you have a static size to your pagefile and Windows isn't constantly resizing it to optimum. Adding more RAM, so the pagefile is needed later, is usually the best, if that's an option. YMMV.
Mine's set to 4096 min, 4096 max (may be XP's limit per partition, not sure).

The stuff in the RAM is whats expected to be needed now by your CPU. Your pagefile has "data" taken from RAM that you aren't expected to need immediately (or ever), freeing up space in your RAM.
http://kb.iu.edu/data/acwa.html

 

[Hardin]

If you run out of physical ram a program will use the page file which is still faster than the swap files. So it's better to have more virtual memory.