Battlefield 2 Memory Usage *Results Updated*

[otispunkmeyer]

crud..........well the demo played just fine for me, and that was on 64 player servers...but of course only the 32 player map was available.

i do have a spare slot for ram, but to be honest i dont think dropping to DDR200 (from 400) is worth it. it would be like taking 1 step forward with more memory and then taking 1 step back with a 50% reduction in bandwidth

not really having the money to spend about £140 on a 2Gb dual channel kit (possibly the only way i can have DDR400 and 2Gb is to buy 2x1Gb dimms) is there any other way?

i mean a 6800GT surely is enough, the game isnt that spectacular to look at. if i play with a mix of med and high settings and 2xaa and 8xaf i should be fine right?

 

[Abunai]

For those with 1 Gig and say you run the game smoothly with little hitching, what maps are you playing on? I find that makes a significant difference. For example on the Karkland 64p map I get some hitching but not enough to ruin the gameplay. But on the huge Dam map and equally gigantic FuShee map (I think thats what its called) its a very different story. Sometimes Ill have hitches so bad it'll be frozen for 5 seconds at a time (usually getting killed as a result). After I "clear" the area it gets relatively smooth...until I travel to a new part of the map and the whole thing grinds to a halt again.

Whats so frustrating is a lot of us have the rigs to play this game at great fps with high settings (I average 50-75 when it isnt a stuttering mess) but the ram is the bottleneck. I didnt think Id see 2 gigs being a must for a game for at least another year.

 

[Avalon]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
As I said earlier, I have ordered another gig of ram as well. The only thing I dislike about it is, I cant keep 1T settings with 4x512, which is VERY annoying... but I guess its worth it.

If you think 1024x768 hitches, you should try 1920x1200.. ugh. I also upgraded my CPU too.. hopefully that will help some.

edit, also had to change my mobo.. as only DFI offers the volts I need for my ram. It wont work on any others stock.

I wouldn't worry about 1T, Ackmed. Gaming performance only takes an ~3% hit for running at 2T. It seems like the benefits of 2GB far outweigh that 3% hit, at least in this game.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

to be honest i dont think 2gigs should be needed yet, i would be much happier to wait for this game while EA took some lessons off valve on how to make a game engine

could EA's apparent lack of talent be one of the reasons why this game is so resource hungry?

 

[mflacy]

What speed was the hard drive in the test? 7200 or 10,000 rpm?

 

[trinibwoy]

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyeri do have a spare slot for ram, but to be honest i dont think dropping to DDR200 (from 400) is worth it. it would be like taking 1 step forward with more memory and then taking 1 step back with a 50% reduction in bandwidth.

Running single-channel on A64's doesn't result in a 50% bandwidth hit. Dual-channel gives at most a 5-10% boost.

 

[Abunai]

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
could EA's apparent lack of talent be one of the reasons why this game is so resource hungry?

Well Dice is the developer. Not EA. EA doesn't make games, they publish them. Lots of them. They have lots of different developers under their wing, both good and bad. You cant really paint them with a wide brush.

As for Dice's talent, they make great games but I dont think anyone would accuse them of producing incredibly efficient game engines. I assume the reason for the resource hog is the tremendous scale of the maps combined with relatively modern day textures/lighting/shadow/physics etc. But it could just as likely be attributed to poor coding that was unable to find a way to efficiently maintain the scale without requiring an obscene amount of ram to lean onto. Either way the ram is the bottleneck and Im not holding my breath for a patch to fix this particular issue. It seems like it would require a major renovation of the actual code, but I could be wrong.

 

[LasombraB]

Has anyone noticed that on servers that keep rank you run slow with 1GB then on servers that don't keep rank?

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: mflacy
What speed was the hard drive in the test? 7200 or 10,000 rpm?

7200, 8MB cache, WD SE.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Abunai

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
could EA's apparent lack of talent be one of the reasons why this game is so resource hungry?

Well Dice is the developer. Not EA. EA doesn't make games, they publish them. Lots of them. They have lots of different developers under their wing, both good and bad. You cant really paint them with a wide brush.

As for Dice's talent, they make great games but I dont think anyone would accuse them of producing incredibly efficient game engines. I assume the reason for the resource hog is the tremendous scale of the maps combined with relatively modern day textures/lighting/shadow/physics etc. But it could just as likely be attributed to poor coding that was unable to find a way to efficiently maintain the scale without requiring an obscene amount of ram to lean onto. Either way the ram is the bottleneck and Im not holding my breath for a patch to fix this particular issue. It seems like it would require a major renovation of the actual code, but I could be wrong.

Well EA bought Dice which is why I say EA developed it. Possibly they hired others to work on it too. No, it wouldn't require a major renovation of code. Infact I'd be happy if they just precached it before loading so I don't have to precache it myself, per se. Look how good the Unreal 2 engine runs. UT2k4 has vehicles and all that stuff. It would have been perfect.

 

[Spacecomber]

In addition to the utility that xtknight coded for monitoring physical RAM use and Page file size, folks interested in monitoring how their system is handling BF2 might want to look at the performance monitoring tools included with WinXP, as they are quite extensive.

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance.

xtknight, instead of looking at the size of the page file, I followed the percent of page file that was in use, and I didn't see this growing very much, even when playing at a 1600x1200 resolution. I was playing just the one single player map available with the demo, however, when I checked this; so, things might be different when playing the full game, online, with rotating maps.

In any case, I don't have any difficulty believing that once you move beyond the one map that the demo came with that you can see some advantages to more than 1GB of RAM, since the game certainly wasn't leaving much unused RAM when I was experimenting with the Demo.

For me, the other two critical items to keep track of are the number of page faults, especially "hard" page faults, and hard drive reads, which these page faults are associated with. These would be in addition to the amount of physical RAM used and the percentage of the page file utilized.

Space

 

[Abunai]

Not to be a smartass but EA bought Dice to publish them. Not develop for them. They are a publishing company first and foremost. And from what Ive heard Dice's team is pretty much in tact since being acquired. So I fail to see how any problems attributed to this game can be reduced to EA having a "lack of talent". This is 100% Dice's baby.

Anyhow I dont know if the solution is as simple as precaching, but we'll see. Im willing to bet a patch wont improve things much though. Just look at the results in this thread already. 2 gigs or bust.

 

[Acanthus]

Installing the full game now

 

[iwearnosox]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
As I said earlier, I have ordered another gig of ram as well. The only thing I dislike about it is, I cant keep 1T settings with 4x512, which is VERY annoying... but I guess its worth it.

If you think 1024x768 hitches, you should try 1920x1200.. ugh. I also upgraded my CPU too.. hopefully that will help some.

edit, also had to change my mobo.. as only DFI offers the volts I need for my ram. It wont work on any others stock.

I'm at 1920x1200 as well Ackmed. A 2GB upgrade cured me of all of my stuttering, etc.

 

[xtknight]

well...ok...$70 definitely isn't much for a gig of RAM so I'm gonna but that on my bday list. it wouldn't be complete without a geforce 7800 gt also...

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: iwearnosox

I'm at 1920x1200 as well Ackmed. A 2GB upgrade cured me of all of my stuttering, etc.

Thats good to hear.

Originally posted by: Avalon

Originally posted by: Ackmed
As I said earlier, I have ordered another gig of ram as well. The only thing I dislike about it is, I cant keep 1T settings with 4x512, which is VERY annoying... but I guess its worth it.

If you think 1024x768 hitches, you should try 1920x1200.. ugh. I also upgraded my CPU too.. hopefully that will help some.

edit, also had to change my mobo.. as only DFI offers the volts I need for my ram. It wont work on any others stock.

I wouldn't worry about 1T, Ackmed. Gaming performance only takes an ~3% hit for running at 2T. It seems like the benefits of 2GB far outweigh that 3% hit, at least in this game.

I know its not that big of a diff, its just annoying. I already had some sweet ram, Mushkin PC3500 LvL2. Sold it, and got some Mushkin PC4000 Redline. The ram needs 3.5v to run at 2-2-2-5@1T. So I sold my Asus A8N-SLI (which I was perfectly happy with) and got a DFI model that does up to 4v on the ram. All this, and to not be able to use 1T is annoying.

 

[CHOPPER GOD]

Originally posted by: LasombraB
Has anyone noticed that on servers that keep rank you run slow with 1GB then on servers that don't keep rank?

I was totally wondering if stupid gamespy was what was hurting gameplay...I understand that they are taking a big hit on release day but even on servers with 30 ping or 200 ping i was getting "connection problems' seriously like every 15 seconds

 

[imported_DaveA]

hmmz, will probably get 4 of these for my next system

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16820220045

 

[QurazyQuisp]

I saw some one say that they run BF2 in a 800*600 window, does anyone know how to get this to work? I've tried to, but I haven't had success yet.

 

[Spacecomber]

Make some changes to your BF2 shortcut properties. Change +Fullscreen 1 to +Fullscreen 0, and add + scx 800 + scy 600 to get the size of the window. You can move it up to the upper left corner by further adding +wx 0 +wy 0. I'm pretty sure that's how I had it set up.

Space

 

[CHOPPER GOD]

ok extra gig on the way...My page file use hit 1.09 gigs and i have a gig of mem allready. The choice is obvious as I would prefer never using a page file at all

 

[McArra]

1Gb not enough?? Won't play this game, such a bad optimization suxs, It doesn't even have superb graphics:|

 

[blckgrffn]

It looks pretty good with all the goodies turne on and turned up though, it really reminds me of the source engine... which I also think should look better given the power it takes...

 

[The Green Bean]

Originally posted by: McArra
1Gb not enough?? Won't play this game, such a bad optimization suxs, It doesn't even have superb graphics:|

Thats what they all say initially...Sell your TCCDs and picking up 2 GBs of Corsair value for a little extra

 

[mooncancook]

Tested with 2GB last night, and indeed there was no hard disk hitches.