hey framerate freaks!

[Guest odog]

Hey,Ive read some posts lately about better frames if you disable AGP, great tip. Also I found something that made me flip, I found a prog that increased my usable ram from 55% to 82%! that translated into a preinstall 17 fps to a post of 60 fps!!!! I maxed out everything and still get 15 fps! I have a fast proc. 1.75 GHz but my card sux 32mb prosavage. Its called RAMBOOSTER, I use it with CACHEMAN...i dont have links but easily googled. Im flying everywhere at 1000ft,having so much fun i havent d/l'd the new sdk's.let me know if you use it and like it...man i do,its like a new game!ODOG

[Guest]

Increasing the availability of physical RAM will never, as in "never", in and of itself, change a framerate. A very small increase may be possible due to lessening the pausing caused by excessive swap file usaeage and/or texture/scenery loading, but it's seldom measureable unless the system is very poorly designed to begin with. If you are getting some sort of benefit from Rambooster/Cacheman it's almost certainly because of something else that's being done concurrently. Sometimes these "miracle" fixes seem to somehow improve the performance on marginal or poorly configured systems but they seldom, if ever, provide any real benefit to the average user. I just wanted to post the other side of the story before everyone ran out and started downloading...again...sigh...Trip (Flame Suit is ON)Northwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz Abit TH7II-R512MB Samsung 40ns PC800Gainward 64MB GF4 Ti4200 300/57030.30's DX8.1 WinXP ProInwin case / Enermax 431W PSU3DMark2001SE = 12055http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4088814

[Guest]

Gotta agree with Trip on this one.

[Guest odog]

well thanks for your side, Im no expert, but i know better frames when i see them. so does a 64 ram s/u get the same frames as a 512?maybe cuz my card is so bad it helped me. Im not claiming to be some kind of tweakspert, just passing on my findings, personally, for me it did work, whatever it did.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

100 pct. right, Trip.... A clean startup, coupled with prudent program and hardware installation practices, achieves the same results. Cacheman does help somewhat on Win 9x systems, but all it does is place a third-party GUI on known adjustments that can be made to the system.ini, which have been documented and taught in most certification classes for quite some time. And all those adjustments do is put a cap on the amount of memory Windows can use for caching files and directory information--a tradeoff in performance that a purchase of more (and relatively cheap) memory can prevent.-John

[John_Cillis 2,406]

"....maybe cuz my card is so bad it helped me...."Bingo.... I looked at your first post and saw that your card is only 32 megs... Using Cacheman to limit Windows' use of RAM for the vcache is most likely releasing a bit more RAM for your system to use to handle FS texture overhead. RAMBOOSTER doesn't do anything that a clean boot wouldn't already do for your system, however. If it is increasing RAM as much as you say, you need to look at what's loading when your system is starting. Something is using a lot of RAM when it loads--usually most suspects are programs that support icons in your system tray. End-it-all is known for shutting down running tasks, but many folks aren't aware that at startup, many tasks can reserve and fragment a large portion of RAM. This is what programs like RAMBOOSTER try to recapture, but often they go too far, and will sometimes cause the O/S itself to start paging to the Swapfile. That's something I don't recommend, as a Random I/O error can lock your system and sometimes cause lost or damaged HD clusters. The best advice:Boot CleanIf your system has less than 256 megs, get moreAnd for FS2002, anything less than a 64 meg graphics card may slow it down a bit...Many FS-Addons increase memory requirements...On a 256 meg system, with 98SE and a clean startup, and FS2002 running, I still have 80-100 megs of free RAM...