Vista, frees up memory when gaming>

tomanders91 · 12 Feb 2007 at 20:32

Is it true that Vista, because it uses a lot of RAM while idle, frees up memory while gaming? Otherwise i would have thought gaming would be pretty sluggish on Vista even with 2gb of ram, like running XP with 1.5gb.

thanks.

Chris Beard · 13 Feb 2007 at 11:41

I think it fills memory rather than making it unavailable/locking it.

So, to be a bit clearer it would fill memory with applications a+b when you logged in as you always use them. If you then start application a and it needs more ram it can use the ram filled with application b as application b isn't running, it's just pre-loaded.

Otherwise it would be pretty poor, I agree.

bfar · 13 Feb 2007 at 12:49

tomanders91 said:
Is it true that Vista, because it uses a lot of RAM while idle, frees up memory while gaming? Otherwise i would have thought gaming would be pretty sluggish on Vista even with 2gb of ram, like running XP with 1.5gb.

thanks.

Vista loads things like DX9 and reserves plenty of memory for textures. You'll need these things to load games anyway. It will shut down or page out services on its own if it feels its running out of memory. Its really not all that bad, in fact it's better optimised than XP to run the kind of libraries that games need. We just need better drivers from Nvidia and ATI, they're the bottleneck atm.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks for gaming, and I see no disk thrashing or stuttering at all. Thats how you know you're out of memory. I think its going to be the gamers choice by the summer.

tomanders91 · 13 Feb 2007 at 13:24

Ok thanks, i was just worried that games like BF2142 would be crap in Vista.

djay · 13 Feb 2007 at 15:34

tomanders91 said:
Ok thanks, i was just worried that games like BF2142 would be crap in Vista.

BF2142 runs sweet on vista64 for me.

Currently using:

Asus P5WDH
[email protected]
2x1gb GSKILL
8800GTX

tHe_HyBrId · 13 Feb 2007 at 19:05

For me I get quite substantial stuttering in these games:

Oblivion (Quite a fair amount)
NFS:MW (A lot of stuttering)
NFS:C (not as much as Most Wanted)

On this system:

ASUS P5N-E SLI
Intel C2D E6600
GeiL 2gb PC6400 ULL 4-4-4-12
ASUS 8800GTS 640mb

Although Steam games such as CS:S and HL2DM do not stutter at all when maxed out 1280x1024, everything high and/or on, 16xAA and 16xAF etc..

bfar · 14 Feb 2007 at 10:12

tHe_HyBrId said:
For me I get quite substantial stuttering in these games:

Oblivion (Quite a fair amount)
NFS:MW (A lot of stuttering)
NFS:C (not as much as Most Wanted)

On this system:

ASUS P5N-E SLI
Intel C2D E6600
GeiL 2gb PC6400 ULL 4-4-4-12
ASUS 8800GTS 640mb

Although Steam games such as CS:S and HL2DM do not stutter at all when maxed out 1280x1024, everything high and/or on, 16xAA and 16xAF etc..

Thats odd - you have sacks of RAM. How does it fare in Memtest?