OT: Need Vista help suggestions

[Fyron]

Vista does not have any native DX8 code; all the earlier DX stuff gets emulated in the new layers. This results in typically poor performance. Most DX8 games were designed in a bygone era, and do not stress modern hardware at all, so its not as noticeable. But with SE5, the game engine was made with modern (if lower end) machines in mind. Performance in XP is ok, but the translation layer in Vista hurts it quite a bit.

I should also point out that you should not expect "Quadcore" to make a lick of difference for 99.999% of games, since they tend to be single-threaded processes. You end up with lower performance compared to a dual core CPU with individually faster cores (there aren't any modern high-end single core CPU designs, but such would theoretically perform even better). 4 GB RAM is way overkill as well, since no process in XP can normally use more than even 2 GB of (physical) RAM, and they are designed with that in mind (ie: there probably are no games yet that will use more than 2GB even in Vista/XP 64-bit OSes).

[Randallw]

I listened to Fyron when I got my new machine, so I didn't get Vista 64. However the fact that Vista 32 can't use more than 3GB of RAM never came up . At least I have a spare GB if in future I upgrade to 64 bit.

[Fyron]

The actual limit in win32 is somewhere around 3.5GB, depending on how the motherboard chipset reserves hardware address space.

[Romulus68]

I found a way to make the game play smoother in Vista 64bit.

Play in Windowed mode. It seems to run a thousand times better. Not sure why, but it does.

[Fyron]

Romulus68 said:
Play in Windowed mode. It seems to run a thousand times better. Not sure why, but it does.

Resolution explains a great deal.

AgentZero said:
RAM stuff

Physical memory and address space are different beasts, and it all gets pretty confusing. A lot of the limits have to do with MS' marketing decisions, as per the charts here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...78(VS.85).aspx

Randallw said:
I read it was because it could only count the number of bits of ram up to a power of 32.

That's only true, at the physical hardware layer, if PAE is not enabled. Its been around for a decade or so, and it allows memory addressing to use 36 bits instead of 32. Whether or not specific operating systems use it properly is purely up to marketing. The non-server versions of Win32 do not normally support PAE, even though there is no technical reason why every version of Windows 2000, XP and Vista 32 bit can't support 64 GB physical RAM.

[AgentZero]

Fyron said:
The actual limit in win32 is somewhere around 3.5GB, depending on how the motherboard chipset reserves hardware address space.

I thought it could handle 4GB, but most people only saw 3GB because Windows takes 500MB as protected kernel something or other space, then it addresses the video card, which tend to be 512MB in most cases, which only left it 3GB worth of addresses to give to the RAM.

I have 32-bit Vista running with 4GB of RAM installed, and Vista recognizes that I have 4GB of memory, but only shows 3GB as the total available.

[Randallw]

ah well that's good. I'm getting all I paid for.

I read it was because it could only count the number of bits of ram up to a power of 32.