[Question] - Make games use more Ram?

[alsiladka]

Guyz , i have a GB of ram.

But my problem is whenever i tried having a look at what the Games - Need For Speed Most Wanted , Half Life 2 - they are utilising aroung 200 to 300 MB of Ram.

I always tried to make them use the full available RAM , but it never happpens.

Whereas , 7Zip compresses with a constant usage of 660 MB

Is there some way i can make the games also use up more RAM instead of pagefile?

[cluberti]

Add more RAM? The games go through the NT memory manager, which determines where a process' virtual address space is allocated. If you're finding that the memory manager is paging out large portions of a process' virtual address space, there's likely a good reason for it. If you were to add more RAM to your machine, the games would likely have more of their allocated address space run in RAM.

[alsiladka]

But my grumbling is ,

that when an app can use 660 MB on RAM on my present system ,

why not a Game?

The techies must be knowing of someway to make this happen?

[gdogg]

the game simply doesn't use the memory.

when games get loaded into memory, other things get paged.

[cluberti]

It also depends on the process (game) itself - after loading the game run performance monitor and see what the process' virtual size and private bytes are - I'll bet it's rather large, and thus only active code is running in RAM, while the rest is paged out. Remember, there's more to a process than just RAM usage, and how the memory manager allocates RAM and paging space to a process depends on a lot of things. Again, short of disabling the page file altogether, your only real option is to add more RAM (or perhaps disable most other running processes, but there's no guarantee there).

[LLXX]

Maybe the game doesn't need that much RAM? It'll only request what it needs.

So, I see this question as being somewhat rediculous. It's like asking if you can make Windows bigger so that it'll fill up your hard drive

[Mr Snrub]

Maybe the game doesn't need that much RAM? It'll only request what it needs.

Correct.

I have checked NFSMW before on my XP x64 system with 2GB of RAM and noticed it "only" consumes around 300MB also - this is just the design of the code.

As you play the game in distinct sections, the sounds, graphics, map, etc. are loaded into memory - and when you switch to a different part (start a race, enter a shop, whatever) then the memory is overwritten by the new data, not loaded in addition to it.

Depending on which way you look at it, it is either good or bad - good in that it does not require that much memory, bad in that every time you switch sections it will force file I/O (although the cache manager in Windows should take care of much of this).