rec.autos.simulators

I was running N4 at 1024x768 on my P3 866/Geforce2 MX/128 meg machine,
and getting brief stutters, generally at the exits of turns.
The problem really irked me at New Hampshire, since the corners are
tight and the racing is close. The stutters were enough to have me
bumping traffic.
I had N4 set to show about 12 cars ahead, and thought that might be my
problem until I took the lead and the problem persisted with no cars
in my view.

I noticed quite a bit of disk access, which clued me in to trying more
RAM. The difference is HUGE after upgrading to 256meg.
I jumped right into a quick race with no qualifying at New Hampshire,
and even from the back of the pack there is no disk access and the
stutters are gone.

Tim

"But in a way, fear is a big part of racing, because if there was
nothing to be frightened of, and no limit, any fool could get into
a motor car and racing would not exist as a sport." -- Jim Clark

--
Joe Marques

Agreed. I've had the same experience. The longer I raced last night, the
worse the stutters got. For the original poster, adding more ram probably
helped, because there was more memory to leak ;)

Bart Westra

--
Eric

-Larry

-Larry

   The option you want is "virtual memory".  Go to: Start Menu /
Settings / Control Panel / System icon / Performance tab / Virtual
Memory button.  Click on "Let me specify my own virtual memory
settings".  Set Minimum and Maximum to *the same value* (this will
keep the swap file from re-sizing, causing unexpected disk access).
Probably a value between 2X and 4X your physical (RAM) memory (I used
2.5X, 320M for 128M RAM).

"But in a way, fear is a big part of racing, because if there was
nothing to be frightened of, and no limit, any fool could get into
a motor car and racing would not exist as a sport." -- Jim Clark

I have used a fixed sized swap in the past, but I'm letting Windows
manage the memory at the moment.
Did you notice a that setting it manually reduced disk thrashing?
I was due for a memory upgrade for the apps I run anyway, but N4 gave
me a real reason. Heh.

Tim

Tim

If you decide to use the manual virtual memory settings, you should
run defrag before doing this so the swap file is written in one
continuous block on the hard drive.
I've also seen it recommended that if you have 2 hard drives to set
the swap on a drive *other* than the one Windows is on.

Tim

Had DMA checked, but thanks for the suggestion.

Tim