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Post by Renegade1911 on Dec 25, 2015 18:44:37 GMT
So yesterday I got myself a new GPU. Went from GTX 560Ti to GTX 970. I plugged it in, installed new drivers and tried running GTA. No matter the settings, the game would always crash after about a minute of gameplay. The symptoms of the crash were a "memory could not be read" and always some different gibberish error. The game would also deload some textures and even meshes about a second before the crash. The further away from the camera the more things would get deloaded. This is incidentally a same thing that used to happen to me with the 560Ti when I played on high settings. After some time (hour, 2, 3) the visuals started to quickly degrade eventually leading to this very same crash. I tried reinstalling drivers, which didn't help, so I went looking for a different solution. It has to be said that the other games I tried were Rocket League, which ran perfectly fine, and Fallout 4, which ran still like crap, but at a much higher framerate (but I attribute that to having installed a pirated, unpatched version of an already terribly optimized game). The thing that I tried next and what has now fixed my problem is changing the paging file size in Performance Options under System Properties. Its size was set to 0, while the recommended size (by Windows itself) was 12199MB. So I changed it to just that, and since then GTA runs just fine. What I'm trying to get to - is this solution the right way to go? Is it not some sort of a "dirty way", that could negatively impact performance compared to a "proper" solution? Because from what I understand the paging file is some sort of secondary option to RAM on the HDD, when RAM gets overloaded, which sounds cool, but not particularly fast or suited for gaming. And of course I had not tampered with this setting while my previous GPU was installed, and then it worked just fine, so yeah. Any ideas or comments would be as always greatly appreciated.  Edit: My Speccy profile. Very useful. Thank you sngrmns + some tags, hope you guys don't mind. method0ne Grumples_Plox (grimreaper977) |
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sngrmns
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Post by sngrmns on Dec 25, 2015 20:36:52 GMT
On pagefile.sys
My inexpert advice from personal experience:
If you read this and see me talking out of my ass, please plug the hole and provide better information.
You're right that it's like a slow extension of RAM, this is a good simple understanding. Just because it is available, and slower, doesn't necessarily mean it's slowing down your games. Windoze is designed to operate with a paging file. Many applications / games "expect it to be there" and may not operate properly without one. Also worth noting is that modern graphics drivers / Windoze can and often do (again depending on the game) allocate a portion of system (mainboard) RAM as extra VRAM (Graphics card memory). System RAM is still slower than VRAM but much faster than a HDD or SDD; having this "shared memory" helps a lot with loading assets (textures etc) into your GPU. Win7 has strange and outdated notions of what should be a "Recommended" size. I think I read that Win10 has adopted a more sensible or sophisticated method for setting this. My personal settings: With 8GB of RAM, to play games on Windoze 7, I always provide a healthy ~7GB paging file on my "free" or "unused" SSD. I'll clarify what I mean by "free" later. For me this provides plenty of "extra ram" to hold some game assets for memory, and also to ALT+Tab and watch funny cat videos on the wide world of web. Maybe this is absolute rubbish; it works for me.
Depending on your OS and the game you're playing, you can get away without one, probably, for the most part. It's not really recommended though. You may never know what happens if you get BSoDs or other "big problems" because your Windoze will have no pagefile to write a "crash dump" to. Granted the space required for this function is very small and is stated in the settings window but it's worth mentioning. Also, if you do happen to run low on free physical memory, you will run into problems. You know this already though because you're posting here, haha. Windoze recommendations are "safe", but are usually going to be a waste of space (if using fixed size) i.e. just too damned big. This is great for stability, since it is unlikely that you will run out of virtual memory. If using a variable size, Win will increase pagefile size up to the specified maximum as demanded. This filesize will/should be reset to minimum specified on a reboot. The (brief) process of automatically increasing the page file can (possibly) introduce some small and momentary decrease in game performance. MAYBE, and again depending on your exact system. I really don't think it's likely in most cases if you have a proper working rig. If storage space / fine optimization is not a concern you can easily just use that Recommended Value, set your max/min locking the pagefile to that, and forget about it. IMO it's unlikely that you will have any performance benefits from NOT having this space for Windoze to use. (Bar graphs from artificial benchmarks don't count!) I have experimented a bit in the past: {Click to Expand Test summary}
to see just how much of my pagefile Windoze will fill while playing GTA and alt+tabbing (albeit with no more than a couple browser windows open). This game does seem to fill it up quite readily.
I set a manual static value of 14GB split evenly (7168 MB) between two identical SSDs (SSD vs HDD not important, just fair to mention), one containing the game. Though the "less active" SSD (without the game on it) of course filled its pagefile.sys more quickly (simple optimization by Windoze), the two drives' usages evened out in the end.
After several hours doing heists, freeroam, etc I find my usage generally "plateaus" at 9 -10GB. This usage in my opinion is not crucially necessary. It will help to have data paged on a "free" or separate physical drive that is not significantly slower than the one containing your game. AFAIK and depending on the specific game/how it's coded, it will also help to have paging space if only on a single physical disk containing your OS / the game / pictures of cats and everything else; but How much a larger pagefile will help in ANY case depends on other factors in your system and software like GPU/VMem, CPU, RAM speeds, HDD speeds and number/configuration/interface of drives, etc. This is a very informative video (Part 1 of 2) from Tech·Ed North America 2011 This goes very in depth on workings of Windows memory management, but has a pretty good bit toward the end you may find interesting. channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL405?format=html5
The most pertinent stuff for you starts at about 1:09:00
Edit: The previous several minutes show the author simulating out-of-memory situations in Windoze,
also kinda interesting and may provide some knowledge.
I provided a link to HTML5 Version because Silverlight sucks. Remove ?format=html5 from the link to go back to auto view. Obviously you don't need to know all of this, the presentation is geared toward those in IT fields. It might be an interesting couple of minutes though if you grab a coffee, and check out the video at the time I provided.
"Can't I just buy a million Gigabytes of RAM?"
Sure, and please throw some my way!
- I hope this was not too boring for you.
- If you got this far I commend your capacity for bullshit.
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Post by Renegade1911 on Dec 25, 2015 21:49:45 GMT
sngrmns Thanks, I'll look into that. My rig is consists of 8 gigs of RAM, i5 2500K CPU and the aforementioned GTX970 and a 750W PSU to power all that. What other info can I provide?
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sngrmns
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Post by sngrmns on Dec 25, 2015 22:35:33 GMT
Address and location of unlocked window so I can steal your 970... Joking aside I hope I provided enough info to help you make an informed decision, I am not an expert and I hate to try giving "magic numbers" if I can't sit right down at a machine / know the user's exact needs. That's more time than I'm willing to spend here honestly but if you have any specific questions about stuff feel free to ask here. Edit: For future reference if you need to list system config, or are asked, Speccy (link) is a popular program that I have often seen suggested. There are different ways to get this info without a special program but this is probably the easiest for the non-savvy. Publishing a Speccy Profile |
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Post by arsenalgunner20 on Dec 25, 2015 22:46:58 GMT
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sngrmns
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Post by sngrmns on Dec 25, 2015 23:27:42 GMT
CHILLI too from the looks of things.
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method0ne
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Post by method0ne on Dec 26, 2015 3:58:04 GMT
To be fair, most of what I'll say has been covered already.
Windows can be run perfectly fine without a page/swap file, but every now and then a program running (either in the background, or a game you're playing) can eat up enough RAM that there's none left to use. Here we hit a snag, because Windows will try to unload things from RAM to free space and upon finding no page/swap available it cannot always do so safely and often will simply crash the program you're using instead of the whole operating system.
If having a page/swap file stops a program from crashing, then your best bet is to have one, regardless of how slow it may seem, since the program in this case is a game, Windows will only swap out background programs to the page file as and when needed to keep enough RAM available for the game, and the likelihood of you even noticing this is slim to none.
How big the page/swap file is, well, that's up to you, tons of older guides advise that having at least 1.5 times your physical RAM is the safest bet, you're running 8GB RAM and Windows suggested 12GB, that wasn't a coincidence. Frankly in this day and age I believe those numbers are overly exaggerated, and for the longest time I ran without any page/swap on my own system until I needed it because like you, a program crashed without it (even without all my RAM being used).
I currently run a heavily modified Windows 8.1, and I let the OS manage the page/swap on its own (currently at ~2GB size) but if I were to set it myself, I'd simply reboot my system and check how much RAM is being used by the base OS and the few programs I let run at startup, round up to the nearest GB, set it and forget it. This way if RAM is required, everything including background OS tasks that aren't critical can be offloaded safely.
Edit for clarification;
You asked if this was the right way to go, and the honest answer has to be yes, it stops your game from crashing, and the only other solution would be to buy more RAM and hope it doesn't still happen regardless of the extra memory.
Something you could potentially try is running a memory test (google memtest86) to check if your RAM isn't actually having hardware issues, but given that you said other games run fine and that with a page/swap file GTA is ok as well, I wouldn't be overly concerned.
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Post by Renegade1911 on Dec 26, 2015 10:38:22 GMT
UPDATE: Got this message when I booted up the PC today: Windows created a temporary paging file because of a problem that occured with your paging file configuration when you started your computer. Total paging file size for all disk drives may be somewhat larger than the size you specified.
When I checked its size now it says just over 8 gigs.
Is there any chance that my 8 gigs of DDR3 1333MHz RAM are bottlenecking the GPU?
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nudeltime
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Post by nudeltime on Dec 26, 2015 16:31:05 GMT
Renegade1911 arsenalgunner20 All the info here is pretty much enough! It's just a normal thing 8GB won't bottleneck your GPU ^^ and the frequency is irrelevant. your system should be fine, are you getting frame drops or why do you ask?
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Post by Renegade1911 on Dec 26, 2015 20:15:39 GMT
Renegade1911 arsenalgunner20 All the info here is pretty much enough! It's just a normal thing 8GB won't bottleneck your GPU ^^ and the frequency is irrelevant. your system should be fine, are you getting frame drops or why do you ask? It's just that this whole situation is making me anxious. I've hoped for a much smoother start with this GPU. GTA runs well enough, at 40-60 FPS with FXAA on (Just 2x MSAA tanks the framerate a lot. I was hoping for more, tbh.) and most settings on very high (grass just high). |
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sngrmns
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Post by sngrmns on Dec 26, 2015 22:20:30 GMT
[...]Your system should be fine, are you getting frame drops or why do you ask?[...] Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. -Mark Twain Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow. -Swedish proverb tl;dr Most likely your system is fine, your RAM is perfectly acceptable for your CPU/GPU, try to put expectations out of your mind and enjoy the upgrade! Unless you are having more crashes / errors, "strange behavior" or warnings from windows (the pagefile thing was normal) I would not be worried at all. No offense but it sounds like you're nervous just because of a lack of technical knowledge / familiarity with systems and how they work with games in general. Bad components won't cause low fps as much as they will just cause your system/apps to hang or crash. If you really want to rule out memory issues you can research and then use hardware testing tools like MemTest, etc but I would not bother unless you see a real problem as mentioned before. I'll bet your fidelity / performance is WORLDS above what it was with the 560Ti - I own / used to use one, I know! GTA is (I think) really well optimized but also can require a lot of oomph. You shouldn't expect get close to to Maxing It Out (not including antialiasing) unless you're spending an ungodly amount on a gaming rig with SLI and a trained monkey for startup with an entire brass ensemble under the desk to play your Windows Alert sounds.. I'm sure you realize this already, it just bears mentioning.MSAA is a heavy process for any card. Especially in GTA, where there are such complex scenes, the GPU is trying its best to smooth every one of those edges.. it also requires quite a bit more VRAM. It kinda has to render everything twice (simplified explanation). At least with GTA, MSAA also is applied to Grass / Foliage so big hit there; lots of complex shapes/edges. Personally with my 770-2GB I /could/ run 2x MSAA but it honestly isn't enough of an improvement to make up for loss of my stable 60fps. - so I just use FXAA - Especially for racing where a steady presentation / input is a lot more important to me than baby-smooth taillights in front of me ;o) For screenshots and stuff I'll crank up all the settings with max MSAA and laugh as my FPS tanks. If you are running near or over the limit of VRAM you may experience some drops or especially pop-in not much related to GPU cores processing power. If you're approaching VRAM limits try turning Pedestrian Variety or Distance Scaling down, this can save quite a bit of VRAM and the only detraction will be in .. well .. variety of pedestrians. Some people report better performance running Windowed Borderless vs Fullscreen; this has always been the opposite for me. Try for yourself. If you haven't seen it, this thread has a little advice for optimizing GTA settings: nodo.freeforums.net/thread/4143/performance-tips-cpu-speed-carAlso I'm sure you are aware of TweakGuides and the GeForce Settings Guides on the web, reference those if you haven't; they're quite helpful for determining which settings you may need to decrease to squeeze out a stable FPS. Certain settings have only a small impact on performance with high-end cards/fast CPU (Tessellation, Shader Quality); some have a huge impact (Grass, MSAA, Shadows) - experiment and see what's comfortable. Personally before patches improved performance for me (they can also cause problems but these are usually fixed pretty quickly), I would lock my refresh rate in game settings to 50Hz (essentially making both monitor and game 'cap' at 50fps) and it helped a lot with smoothness. For me 45-50fps is a lot less bothersome than jumping between 45-60. I can definitely tell the difference between presentation at 50 or 60fps but it was better than jumping around. Your mileage may vary. Edit/addendum: This probably has nothing to do with your issue, it's not likely you are pushing GTA close to this limit - but just an interesting note about your 970: www.pcgamer.com/why-nvidias-gtx-970-slows-down-using-more-than-35gb-vram/Excerpt:[...]The GeForce GTX 970 is equipped with 4GB of dedicated graphics memory. However the 970 has a different configuration of SMs than the 980, and fewer crossbar resources to the memory system. To optimally manage memory traffic in this configuration, we segment graphics memory into a 3.5GB section and a 0.5GB section. The GPU has higher priority access to the 3.5GB section.[...] My Graphics Settings for reference : I really wanted Very High textures so I made some concessions in order to help my card along. { Spoiler - click to show image}  |
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Post by Renegade1911 on Dec 27, 2015 0:55:52 GMT
sngrmns I probably lead you to a wrong path of thought with mentioning MSAA. I love how the game looks. After tinkering with the settings for a bit, I have most things on very high, advanced settings are on/maxed (except frame scaling and hi-res shadows), softest shadows (PCSS ones look a bit strange and are not worth the fps decrease imo). So except for a few minor settings the game is ALMOST maxed out. I remember what an extreme change it was going from the 360 to PC. But to be honest, to be able to tell a difference between the settings I used to run with my 560Ti (all medium, 80% distance scaling, high water and postFX) and what it is now is kinda hard during normal gameplay. You really have to focus on it. The new shadows cast off everything or the amazing reflections are great, but you have to stop and look for them to really appreciate the change. The setting I enjoy the most is very high shadows. Seeing its wonders in a race or a crowd of peds is delicious. And yeah, I dislike motion blur too. However I have my pop density and variety to max. I guess I spend a lot more time bothering civvies than you do. 
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sngrmns
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Post by sngrmns on Dec 27, 2015 1:45:57 GMT
Ahh no worries about leading me astray - it may be obvious by now that I tend to ramble - I will take a simple question like "What day is it" and end up talking about why we call it Wednesday... I like the 'sound of my own voice' I guess. Was mostly just giving my opinion and a little relevant info as I understand it. I am envious of your shadow settings ;o) I've been tempted to upgrade to a 980 or similar but decided I can hold off until the new generation of cards.
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nudeltime
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Post by nudeltime on Dec 27, 2015 13:43:02 GMT
sngrmns my job here is done, we have this guy now lmao dude, keep it up, i love your explanations!
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