issue with 2900PRO in vista

[faxon]

built this rig a while back with an hd4670 in it. just swapped the rig to a better case, put the old guts in a new case, and hooked up my 2900PRO. i also moved from XP to vista on it. now, the problem is i only have 2GB of system memory until my other 4GB arrives in the mail from new egg, and for some reason unknown to me either vista or the catalyst driver decided that 1GB of GDDR4 wasnt enough, and went to go grab another 766mb from system main memory, which is making the system a bit sluggish at times. since i have never had this issue before, i have no idea how to fix it, and half an hour of looking in configuration settings netted me nothing. bit of insight?

ed: would be nice to get this fixed tonight. as is my athlon 64 4000+ is outperforming my e5200 @ 3.2ghz in all games because i have virtually no system memory free to use, and i was looking forward to gaming some on this rig

 

[zagood]

"athlon 64 4000+ is outperforming my e5200 @ 3.2ghz in all games"

EDIT: just realized your 2900pro is in the "old guts in a new case"...ignore last post.

Vista's usually good at allocating ram for what you need. I doubt that's the problem. Open up your task manager, pull up your performance, and leave it open in the taskbar while doing some gaming. Check it afterward and see if it spikes up to/past 2gb.

 

[faxon]

i cant open any games actually. i only managed to get to the character select screen for everquest2 (which takes about 35mb of ram) before the game crashed because it ran out of memory. upon opening task manager it has informed me that i only have 40MB of free system memory. i already disabled superfetch so this isnt the issue. based on how much memory i was using in XP + the usual amount extra vista takes up, i should have about 8-900mb left over to run some games in, but 766 of it is allocated to my graphics card, leaving me with about 50mb left total.

http://img140.imageshack.us/my...ge=taskmanager1kx9.jpg

http://img294.imageshack.us/my...age=taskmanger2sm8.jpg

http://img149.imageshack.us/my...ge=advancedinfoix7.jpg

 

[faxon]

okay so i dont know why, but now after rebooting im running all of my games fine. its still allocating 766mb of video memory aside but it isnt blocking the system from using it if need be. im still using all 2GB of my ram though with 1 instance of everquest2 open hogging 1GB of it when i know it used to use 1.6 in XP at least. guess i will wait for my other 4GB of memory to get here before i do any benchmarks. would still like an answer though to how to completely disable using system ram for video ram in its entirety, since i simply dont need it, and having a process/service enabled which is managing it will in itself decrease system performance unless it is utilized

 

[Qbah]

Vista uses all possible RAM for SuperFetch, keeps all your recent stuff in there so it loads faster. It frees as much as an application needs so that it's transparent to the stuff that runs. It's one of the best features of Vista

You having like 40MB free means everything is working the way it should

 

[BFG10K]

Originally posted by: faxon

i cant open any games actually. i only managed to get to the character select screen for everquest2 (which takes about 35mb of ram) before the game crashed because it ran out of memory.

How do you know it ran out of memory? Did the dialog say so, or are you assuming it ran out of memory simply because it crashed?

The behavior you?re describing is perfectly normal in Vista and your attempts to ?fix? it will likely break things. That memory will be freed as soon as it?s required, and if your games aren?t launching then you have a problem elsewhere.

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: faxon
okay so i dont know why, but now after rebooting im running all of my games fine. its still allocating 766mb of video memory aside but it isnt blocking the system from using it if need be. im still using all 2GB of my ram though with 1 instance of everquest2 open hogging 1GB of it when i know it used to use 1.6 in XP at least. guess i will wait for my other 4GB of memory to get here before i do any benchmarks. would still like an answer though to how to completely disable using system ram for video ram in its entirety, since i simply dont need it, and having a process/service enabled which is managing it will in itself decrease system performance unless it is utilized

Your post is very confusing because allocation of system RAM has absolutely nothing to do with how much physical video RAM you have. Also, I hope your Vista upgrade was to the 64bit version, otherwise you're going to have significantly less than 6GB (assuming you're adding the 4GB you ordered to the 2GB you already have) of usable system RAM due to 32bit limitations.

 

[vj8usa]

I don't think that shared system RAM in your video adapter properties really means you're constantly using that much RAM just for video. For instance, I have a 512MB card and that dialog window says I'm using 2815MB of "Shared System Memory". Also, I have 6GB of RAM and currently have 0MB free in task manager (doing nothing but browsing the web). That's just how Vista handles RAM - Superfetch tries to make use of all your RAM as best as possible. It's a good thing; unused RAM is wasted RAM.

In short, don't worry about your RAM allocation, everything seems to be normal.

 

[akugami]

If you want to see what is hogging up actual RAM, look under the Processes tab of the Task Manager. With the Super Fetch activated (default config) it should leave you with very little memory free when viewing the Performance tab. This is normal. I think the issue was something other than your video card.

 

[faxon]

yea idk what it was. everquest2 used to have crash issues like that in the past when you didnt have enough memory for certain things. in XP the fix was simply to make sure you had at least 2gb of ram. im betting the only reason i crashed was because vista was eating into that "buffer" zone somewhat more. yes i upgraded to 64bit vista. seems all i needed was a reboot, but the game itself is maxing out my memory anyway. i loaded into a relatively lag free area of one of the zones after rebooting the game, then watched it slowly climb from 1.5gb used to 2gb, and at about 1.8gb my framerate started spiking downward relatively fast. now on the flip side, when i do have enough memory and i enable multicore processing (you can disable it in settings in eq2) im at 90% load on core 1, and about 65-70% on core 2, and the game isnt crashing (eq2 dual core support was crashing the game when it launched, something to do with the task scheduler swapping the processes from core to core rapidly), which means that i REALLY will benefit greatly from the system upgrade. i was running 100% load constantly on my old CPU while my gpu would be so lightly loaded it wouldnt even go out of power save mode.


**waits in anticipation for this kit to arrive**