Technical Notes: RAM usage for 64 bit OS

Hi guys,
wanna share my experience and hopefully it will be usefull for some of you out there.
Tech world is a Jungle and finding a config which suits perfectly with all your needs is not always easy, and most often we can't expect top performances on everything we are running on our machines, being it due to bottle-necks on user end side or for programming failures on the Software side.
The last case is clearly the case of Age of Conan, everyone who plays that game is perfectly aware of it's issues managing a multicore CPU as well as its insane requirements in terms of RAM memory.

Many 64bit OS users with an average ov 4GB of RAM DDR3 may have noticed how the RAM usage (I was using G15 performance screen) can be established pretty much always in a range between 95-98%, which obviously take out all the memory available on a PC (and 99% of the products out on the market are running absolutely fine with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, just to let you know) making you pretty much difficult to do anything.

This leads to some issues in game, which are often masked as lag spikes with really huge pings (around 4.5k ms), I discovered that this is not real lag but it's strictly linked to the RAM usage, there are some posts talking about it on the official forums, but spreading the word it's not a bad thing at all so I will describe the symptoms I had and the really easy solution I found to solve them.

First of all my rig:

Mobo: Asus p7p55d LE
CPU: Intel i5-750 OC 3.2GHZ
RAM: 4GB Kingston DDR3 1333Mhz
GPU: GeForce GTX 570
HD: Maxtor 7600rpm (500gb) and another Maxtor regular rpm 250gb roughly
Cooler: Noctua Tower
OS: Windows 7 64-bit

With this rig, I've always been able to enjoy the game, there were sometimes some mini freezes while loading textures, loading time were average but with huge spikes in terms of time when it comes down to loading heavy zones like Paikang, Chosain or Northern Grasslands.
The most common issues i found were a heavy rubberbanding, average lag on 150-250ms (yellow), npcs loading while I was walking in a zone with consequent freeze on the screen, alt-tab crashing, game crashes.

Although I managed to play the game like this for almost a year at some point I grew tired of this and I started to verify what was my machine doing when a freeze was occurring, so I deactivate my antivirus and any background running application and I noticed to important things:

1) My HD led was always active, like there was a swapping during the read of information;
2) My RAM usage was always at 95%, regardless of any other side activity of the machine;
3) The trend on the RAM usage was always increasing.

I was damn sure though that the issue was on my HD, so I did a deep clean of it, uninstalled obsolete stuff, launched a complete cycle of cleaning for apps and win register with "CC Cleaner", made a great scanning with "AD Aware" and finally made a deep and long (5-6 hours) cycle of defrag with "My Defrag".

After that I launched the game again with 50% of my HD space free and optimized.

The situation was a bit better, but after a couple of hours the problems came back in all their might. At that point it was clear that it was not a HD related issue, I had the suspect but I wanted to be sure.

So I went to my PC shop I bought other 4GB of DDR3 RAM and I installed it on my pc.

Result?

Yesterday I did a full siege in full graphical setting with 4 application running on background without having my fps down 40, without a single lag spike, I can safely alt tab without crashing, my loading time decreased from 3 minutes to pretty much immediately regardless of which zone i'm loading, NPC are all loaded as soon as i'm out of loading screen and my HD can finally rest a bit more without being stressed.

So far fellow players, if you do not mind spending money in a 4GB more of RAM and you like me really want to play AoC having top performance, with 30€ you can solve all your issues installing a new RAM block.

Some side notes: That was my case and those were my signals that there was something not working, if you find that you have similar issues and your rig is similar to mine, and you know for sure your connection cannot be accused of anything, well this may be the solution, I cannot of course guarrantee that you will solve everything with this, but in my opinion it is worth a try.


IMPORTANT: If you are a 32bit OS user, do not buy other RAM! 32 bit OS will accept only 4gb of ram regardless of how many ram you phisically have installed on your machine, so before wasting your money take your time to read through the InternetZ to verify if your PC can sustain this new memory and if you meet the requirements.


Hopefully this will help :)

See ya!

Arcalimon