Registry mod to improve gaming performance, memory management?

Caporegime
Joined
12 Mar 2004
Posts
29,913
Location
England
Im trying to remember where the registry entries are located for this tweak, the one where you change the values to 1 for disable paging executive and enable large page file. Ive done a search of the registry but it doesnt come up.
 
Soldato
Joined
1 May 2003
Posts
11,071
Memory Performance

Improving memory performance can be done simply by preventing your hard drive from being used for cache. This is only useful with 256Mb or more of RAM.

Everything that you'll need to edit here can be found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management

So of course add [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] to your *.reg file.

Disable Paging Executive
This will prevent pages sections from RAM going to the hard drive. If you have a large amount of RAM at least 256Mb (I suggest 512) you might want to keep the data in your RAM to improve your performance considerably due to reduced amount of hard drive swappage. The entry that you will want to modify is called DisablePagingExecutive. Changing this from 0 to 1 will keep the data in your RAM.

"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

System Cache Boost
The XP kernel can be loaded into your RAM with a simple registry edit. This can greatly improve performance since the NT Kernel will always be in your RAM. With this edit you will allocate roughly 4Mb of your RAM for the kernel. Sometimes more RAM is used but most of the time it is only 4Mb. The entry that you will need to find is called LargeSystemCache and you'll need to change this from 0 to 1 in order to enable this.

"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

To put both of these RAM tweaks into use you'll add something like this to your reg file

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001
 
Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
18,022
Location
London & Singapore
The descriptions for those tweaks are wrong.

DisablePagingExecutive just turns off paging of kernel mode drivers. So this means all those redundant drivers that aren't being actively used (e.g. a USB device driver) will stay in main memory gobbling up the valuable resource. This is only intended to be used by device driver developers when debugging. It should not be used by average joes because 1) a lot of drivers (*cough* ATI) aren't tested with it, 2) it wastes non-paged pool memory needlessly - a very valuable and already severely limited resource, 3) there won't be any performance increase.

LargeSystemCache increases the size of the system cache (this can also be set through Control Panel, no need to "hack" the Registry...) and this makes the system more tuned for server applications. It's not recommended that you use this on a desktop/gaming system. The only time it should be used is on relatively "static" server systems which just run the same software all day long (e.g. database, Exchange etc).
 

mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
99,994
Location
South Coast
Also these tweaks dont have any major effect on performance at all, it's in most peoples heads mainly. I was the same and until I was told otherwise I never compared both ways side by side and indeed there is no performance gain that's worth the effort (tested on 3200+/1gb dual channel 400/6800GT)

Best thing to do to improve gaming performance is to get more ram or a better gfx card under windows XP.

I also got occasional bsods and memory access errors when using some memory registry tweaks..
 
Don
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
46,744
Location
Parts Unknown
afaik its still not possible to totally prevent paging in xp (non embedded)

you really are better off letting windows manage the pagefile itself..

look into it a bit more
 
Man of Honour
Soldato
Joined
2 Aug 2005
Posts
8,721
Location
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
NathanE said:
The only time it should be used is on relatively "static" server systems which just run the same software all day long (e.g. database, Exchange etc).
Might there be benefit here for computers used mainly for running distributed computing applications like SETI and Folding@Home? They're pretty static in their high levels of memory and CPU useage, especially folding where some work units top out beyond 350 MiB physical memory.
 
Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
18,022
Location
London & Singapore
BillytheImpaler said:
Might there be benefit here for computers used mainly for running distributed computing applications like SETI and Folding@Home? They're pretty static in their high levels of memory and CPU useage, especially folding where some work units top out beyond 350 MiB physical memory.
Unlikely. With those types of applications the work unit (well the part that is actively being worked on, anyway) is stored in main memory anyway.
 
Back
Top Bottom