Would you care to disable nvidia inspector and run a test like that? I know this can cause tearing and what not, but I would like to get an accurate reading. Could be either low average fps you are getting, or spikes of high frametimes.
Nah I get a high 100 with it off (no drops)
This is the worst advise i have read on this forums, if you the set the pagefile into a SSD you will gain speed, but you will reduce the life span of the SSD, thats why in most windows forums they will suggest you to move the pagefile to a HDD. IF you use a SSD like a RAM you will burn it so fast, the cells of sdd can not be rewriten several times like a normal HDD or a RAM module, so don’t follow this adivse unless you want to kill ur ssd in no time for cheap fix to a bad optimized game.
This used to be true for the first generations of SSD drives but at the moment decent triple level cell SSD drives have MTBF’s of 1.500.000 hours. Only enterprise harddisks and SSD’s can offer around 2.500.000 hours. Also you can check the DWPD and TBW values which do matter regarding endurance.
2 Likes
You are grossly excagerating. That would be true for continuous rewrite (and even then it is very hard to kill a SSD in a meaningful amount of time), not for a pagefile. Even if the pagefile is used hard, your ssd is more likely to die from age then from all the rewrites.
Also, you already limited by the SATA/PCIE speed. you are not getting RAM “rewrite speed”.
Let’s not get into fearmongering. Anyone doubting me, make a google search for your own. And maybe I haven’t emphasized it enough, but of course if your pagefile is being used hard, adding ram will make your game faster since it offloads the pagefile. And it will leave more storage room doing so. Those 2 reasons are the only reasons you should consider avoiding the pagefile. the (lack of impact on) lifespan is not a significant reason by any means.
Let us also not forget a SSD makes less noice, runs cooler and uses less energy. I’d say frankly that is more significant than that tiny lifespan difference.
Some documentation to put that silly argument to bed: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/
2 Likes
Their life span is not about hours but about the amount of terabytes you can write on them, sectors will be dying everytime you overwrite them, the normal windows pagefile for normal task is not that much to consider its impact, but if the pagefile is being used as virtual memory for large files, then things change drastically, lets say the game re writes 16 gb of virtual memory per game in a session of 5 hours daily, you will be hitting several terabytes within few months reducing considerably the life of any ssd.
Go check the article and look where it points out 240GB TLC SSDs were doing hundreds of TBs of writes no problem. Again, this is nothing more than fearmongering on your end. Say you did 10 TB of total writes after 3 months. That’s 40 on a year basis, 400 on 10 year. The first drive on the list broke down after 700.
Again, your SSD is way more likely to die from old age than from rewrites.
2 Likes
@SouMexican That’s exactly what I write there.
Let me do some calculation for you. The first generation of memory cells could be written about 1000 times so with old small drives you are correct, but these days almost all SSD’s use a certain amount of increased endurance cells (high level SLC or MLC cache) which handles the data that’s been written to most. Intel optane memory which exist quite a few years already e.g. is meant to be used for page files although striping 2 to 7 (!) NVMe’s will perform even better of course.
The current TBW of my Samsung 2 TB SSD is 26.6 TB. This drive is now 3 years old. They give 10 years warranty on this drive as the TBW is the amazing amount of 600 TBW (!).
So I hope to live long enough to see it die one day.
Also I did configure overprovisioning to 20% (SSD drives also have additional amount of slack space themselves) but now looking at these numbers I think it’s not needed.
Another tip. In general larger SSD drives have greater endurance especially if you just archive a lot which you want have fast access to. So if you doubt between a smaller or bigger one, always take the bigger one.
2 Likes
Increasing RAM from 8 to 16 GB increased benchmark score from 1000.0 to 1025.6 on my i5-8250U MX150 computer at 1920X1080 resolution without enhanced graphics (UHD) dlc 
For the first time I had absolutely no stutter in benchmark.
So I suggest everyone to upgrade RAM to at least 16 GB.
Game often takes 9 GB of RAM, so 8 seems to be too little even without UHD.
INB4… 
Can you share the stock memory clock? Do you think that this could impact a lot for the game?
My memory speed is 1600 MHz. I do not know exact impact of memory speed on game.
System requirements for this game have unfortunately been a lie from the start, so don’t believe them.
1 Like
I believe that the ram clock don’t impact very much in general for games (well it actually can, but its kinda complex and you have to understand portuguese), but AoE II DE does not follow any rule and I wanted to know a opinion from someone that is doing tests.
I know, and that is maybe what made me more upset so far. Here in Brasil this game isn’t only targeted for its nostalgia, but also for accessibility. Low prices and requirements are a big thing to us because games and hardware components are very expensive (imagine paying $230,00 for a AAA release) in our reality. The lying specs aren’t just frustrating, they are borderline scam.
2 Likes
I think you can get away with 8GB, should you close as many background things as possible. Certainly do not leave Chrome open as that will alone eat quite a bit of RAM.
I did have 8GB on my pc and framerate in campaign were absolutely fine (90-120 FPS). When I upgraded to 16GB, I did got rid of stutters. With 8GB the stutters weren’t actually bad, but the game is running more smoothly now with 16GB.
Also, I did try benchmark with and without UHD. The results are… strange. Without UHD I am having consistently between 32 and 38 FPS. With UHD, the benchmark would run terrible for the first dozen of seconds 10-15FPS with a lot of stutters) before reaching the same framerate as without the UHD, with a bit less steady framerate.
8GB is certainly possible, depending on what else is bottlenecking performance. But 4GB is not enough. To be frank, 4GB of RAM is not recommendable in any system nowadays, regardless if you play games or not.
Probably because you don’t have enough RAM and game uses pagefile. Plenty of people have reported, that increasing RAM from 16 to 32 GB was needed for smooth experience with UHD.
1 Like
I’d also say, and yes I know we had this discussion before, because I am running the pagefile off a HDD instead of a SSD, making the pagefile extremely slow. I feel this is being confirmed once a few seconds have passed and the game reaches the same FPS the none-uhd test did (albeit again with bigger framedrops though). Of course, more RAM would also solve this. It’s a matter of perspective.
That being said, campaigns run butter smooth on UHD.