Vanguard on Vista 64 needs 4Gig ram (wow!)

Cokey

My system is E6600, 2GIg DDR2667, 8800GTS, 320Gig + 250 Gig SATA2 drive with Vista Home Premium 64 bit.

Frame rates are pretty good (except in cities) on highest quality - 30's -60's (sometimes higher in dungeons/indoors - hit  80-100fps+ a few times).  FYI I play on 1440x900 with HDR, bloom and tone mapping, 4x anis and 4x AA

My BIG problem was entering new areas, cities etc - sometimes even loading new graphical effects my comptuer woudl stutter/jitter/pause etc - making running through Leth Nurae a nightmare (still happend, though not as severe on highest perf).

I bought an extra 2GIG of DDR2 667 ram today -now having 4 Gigabytes Total -just to see if it would help (seeing I have a 64 bit OS) and gee does it make a HGUE difference in loading.  Char select to ingame = 7 secs or so.  Running into new areas = 1.5/2 sec pause.  Running into towns/cities I no longer have the huge perfomance hits that was happening with my hard drive thrashing away (well almost never).

Also when I exited the game with 2Gig ram - Vanguard client would continue to run for a while (music played for 45 secs or so) and slowly release memory and hard drive would thrash constantly for 2 minutes making computer almost unusable.  This problem has also disappeared.

So if you have Vista 64 (maybe even XP64?) and you have performance/stuttering issues - get 4 Gig ram and wow. (not sure about 3 Gig)

xAlrythx

The problems you are describing to me sound like client problems, but you say that upgrading to 4gb of ram has improved these problems. I never experiance much of these pauses you decsribe or the game still running after I have closed. Then again I play on the balanced setting.

Then again it could be mainly Vista problems. I don't know much about computer and performance issues however.

Cokey

I have read reports of people running on XP with 2Gig Ram systems similar to mine without getting the same kind of performance issues (to the degree) I was.  By 'nightmare' I mean running through the city there would be several pauses and jitteriness due to loading, with massive HDD thrash.  (HDD thrash is something people who get frame rate problems often aren't aware of - they just see their system have a massive slowdown)  Running back through these areas would be fine - just the initial movement into high pop'n areas.

I have been wondering if this has something to do with Vista's superfetch, or perhaps some other kind of massive caching where it couldn't cope running a massive game smoothing with just 2Gig (hence lots of loading/paging).  Maybe it could be an issue specific to Vista 64 bit's memory management.  (I alt-tabbed out once and saw memory usage at 1.75GB (of 2GB) and swapfile at 3.5GB)

Whatever the problem is/was, it has almost entirely disappeared - I bought the ram just to see if it would make any difference, and I got lucky I think.

xAlrythx

That's so strange, I know a few people with computers that are not as good as yours playing on the highest setting with really good performance but they are using XP. I know one of them is upgrading to Vista soon I will post if they experiance any problems like the ones you described.