Far cry... memory hog?

[Sl4y3r]

I just installed the far cry demo, and i tried out with all the video settings on high... it would get lag spikes about every 5 seconds.
So I turned them the settings down to medium and it still does it, I looked at the RAM usage and there was barely any system memory left.
So is far cry (the retail game) as much of a memory hog too?

[snvpa]

yeah it definately is. 1gb is certainly reccomended. Another trick is to set agp apirature in bios to 256 mb.

[Albuquerque]

There are some levels in the real game that, when all video settings are at max, have taken 900+mb of memory. The box wasn't lying when the suggested a minimum of 512mb, because medium settings will probably still use most of that. If you're going to aim for uber-high settings, you're going to want the full gig of ram.

And don't even think about turning off the page file; I had mine set to 128mb on my system and FarCry made my system blow a "Virtual Memory size is too small" error :p

[new_novice]

Originally posted by Albuquerque
There are some levels in the real game that, when all video settings are at max, have taken 900+mb of memory. The box wasn't lying when the suggested a minimum of 512mb, because medium settings will probably still use most of that. If you're going to aim for uber-high settings, you're going to want the full gig of ram.

And don't even think about turning off the page file; I had mine set to 128mb on my system and FarCry made my system blow a "Virtual Memory size is too small" error :p

my page file is still 512Mb but I'm limited by my CPU. The most I've seen it took on my system are about 500 Mbs

[TruckyJ]

I needed a gig of ram in order to run it smoothly. With 512 I would get too much HD access and the result was choppy gameplay.

[NavyDood]

I have 512 MB Corsair XMS PC3200. It ran the game pretty good for me. I shut down everything in my task bar that I could before playing. I never had crazy hard drive seeks times or anything during gameplay.

I really want to get another 512mb ram to see what kind of difference it will make.

My specs are in my sig.

[Boomstick]

I think this will be the norm for newer games. I would expect to it to take double the ram of FarCry to get similar performance for Doom III.

[YellowDart]

Yea, you're prolly right. 1gig will probably become the standard for recommended hardware for the next year or so. I'm almost thinking of picking up another gig. FarCry is consistently eating up about 800mb of ram in my rig/ :eek:

Can't decide if I really want 2 gig, or if I want to blow my money on an 18" LCD monitor. :D

[Mustanley]

I've been playing on the two machines listed in my sig, and the only major difference between the two is the amount of RAM. The game is noticably smoother on the machine with 1GB vs the machine with only 512mb.

[Albuquerque]

Originally posted by new_novice


my page file is still 512Mb but I'm limited by my CPU. The most I've seen it took on my system are about 500 Mbs

The default view in Task manager -> Processes will not show you the entire memory load of the application. You need to select two additional view column options in order to see the true memory load of the app:

View -> Select Columns -> Enable VM Size and Paged Pool.

The combination of Mem Usage, VM Size and Paged Pool is the total memory load of that application on your system. I'll bet you today's lunch money that it hits much over 500mb if you're running highest visual settings and are on one of the bigger levels (I believe River was one of the winners ;) )

You won't see insane amounts of disk paging in the game, fortunately the Crytek programmers did a decent job of "streaming" the data from the drive rather than loading it into ram by huge laggy handfuls. If you are running a 512mb machine, you might notice that your drive light is on a noteable amount of time while traversing the map in a boat or truck or something. It kinda does a continuous loading thing, where you don't get big huge jerky movements when wandering into new territory on the map.

But the smoothness is very noticeable if you upgrade your ram.

[topslop1]

It ran rather crappy on my system with 512mb ram. I'm contemplating whether or not I should sell my mushkin bh5 for a gig of low latency pc 3200 ocz or corsiar.

[Dragonprince]

Definetly a memory hog. 1 gig should do the trick nicely. I have a gig of cas2 ram and have no issues with the game.

[TruckyJ]

Originally posted by Dragonprince
I have a gig of cas2 ram and have no issues with the game.

Sounds "rough"...;)

[jmke]

Medium detail= 512Mb
High detail= 1024Mb
Very High detail= 1024Mb+

this game loves RAM more than Windows does

[Albuquerque]

Originally posted by jmke
Medium detail= 512Mb
High detail= 1024Mb
Very High detail= 1024Mb+

this game loves RAM more than Windows does

I'm going to ammend your statement a little...

Low details = ~200
Medium details = ~350
High details = ~600
Ultra details (many custom settings) = ~900

I haven't been able to push it above 1024mb of memory usage unless I'm in the Sandbox editor. You can get pretty crazy in there if you're not careful, or even if you ARE careful.

[jmke]

it gobbles more then 350 here when using med. detail :)

do note though my numbers are those of total system memory, not just used by FC:)

[Albuquerque]

Speaking just on using PerfMon analyzing the FarCry process, the numbers I posted above are relatively close. They do vary quite a bit depending on what level you're on; some levels use a lot less than others.

FarCry is also SMP / SMT aware as evidenced by it's CPU utilization on hyperthreaded rigs. Wonder what it would do on a true SMP system?

[mikapc]

Has ram memory prices risen much? I was wondering when playing Far Cry what the problem was exactly as I was getting pretty good frame rates but there was still jerkiness when details were on high. With two sticks of twinxms corsair 512 megs at 3200 what should I do to upgrade? Would it be best to just buy a 512 meg stick or sell the corsair ram and have it replaced.

[jmke]

your memory is able to keep up, the jerkiness might have to do with windows using the swap file instead of your ram, look up some windows memory tweaks on how to disable / minimize swap file usage

[Sl4y3r]

Jeesh...
I was thinking about buying another stick of 512 until I saw the prices...$93
I guess I'll have to wait a little now.

BTW I tried running far cry on medium settings and it was still the same choppiness.

[SniperXX]

Im laggy too no matter what... But I expected it from hearing about it being a hog from friends. Im jealous of my one friend since hes got a dual 2500+ Bartons OCed with 1.5GB ram on his MSI board.

[Gogeta_G3D]

I heard 1gig is minimum.

[pik4chu]

Originally posted by SniperXX
Im laggy too no matter what... But I expected it from hearing about it being a hog from friends. Im jealous of my one friend since hes got a dual 2500+ Bartons OCed with 1.5GB ram on his MSI board.

ya im jealous of my boss(P4 3.2 with 2gigs of RAM and aGF asskicker, whatever the newest top-of-the-line, whole rig costed 800bucks :drool: ), he introduced me to this game and unfortunately my computer doesnt like it (and neither do I really, but anywho) if I run medium detail the display gets a blue tint and is extremely choppy (like you wouldnt beleive). Ive got a gig of RAM in the mail. should be here tommorrow so ill see what it does. I dont think this game will be installed for much longer, off to the store it goes this weekend me thinks. current rig in my sig. soon to be replaced by 1gig of PC3000 @ 200, isntead of the mushkin.

[05virulosity50]

i always turn off all of the windows services before I play. it knocks down idle usage to 60mb. also you can try installing an alternative gui shell because ie is a memory hog as well.

[mikapc]

I usually also close down IE explorer before I play and just start game from taskmanager->run. With Win2k I'm able to get down to 100megs of ram being used for basic processes.