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Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Oct. 17, 04)

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Oct 18, 2004.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    Setting max memory - How, Where, and in what?
    No I don't run a server. I don't even play multiplayer.
    It's just that my system specs are way over what's in NWNs minimum requirements but the game runs choppy. So I figured that maybe diverting more RAM to NWN might help.
    But now I've noticed the game got a bit slow after a few hours of play so I think I'm gonna set MaxMemUsage to maybe 70 MB? Hopefully that will help.
    The Max Memory Size does not divert more RAM to NWN - NWN will take as much RAM as it needs to run.

    It basically tells NWN how much RAM it can allocate to cache resources in the resource manager system so it doesn't have to load them from disk and as such reduce disk access. Since reading data from a disk is much slower than reading data from RAM, this gives you performance improvements. However, it will not give you improvements if NWN is running choppy for another reason on your machine (lots of other processes, spyware, older graphics card, slow or damaged memory, disk access by other processes in the background, etc, etc).

    The overall improvement from cachine is more noticeable on machines with bad disk access times (i.e. notebooks), of course. And, again, throwing a lot of RAM on the game to cache resoures is not a magic bullet. Our tests have indicated that for the average client, there is not much benefit to go above the 1/8th of system RAM rule - i.e. 64 MB are enough to not only cache all resources inside an average module, but also most of the frequently used resources the game accesses.

    Keep in mind that the client doesn't care about the module loaded on the server, so if you are playing online on a PW, a huge memsize setting on your machine will help you a lot, the memsize setting on the server has much more impact on your game experience.

    Caching naturally only gives you a visible performance increase if the resource you are caching is frequently used by the game, if it's only used i.e. every minute or so, you won't see any increase in performance at all as the management overhead for caching and usage tracking will probably outweight the benefit of a single avoided disk load every few minutes.

    I'd give these values a shot (and these are guesses - I didn't do any actual testing with them):

    Client, 128 Megs RAM - 16-32 Megs
    Client, 256 Megs RAM - 16-48 Megs
    Client, 512 Megs RAM - 32-64 Megs
    Client, 1024 Megs RAM - 64-128 Megs

    Dedicated Server, 256 Megs RAM, 20 MB Module - 32 Megs
    Dedicated Server, 256 Megs RAM, 40 MB Module - 64 Megs
    Dedicated Server, 256 Megs RAM, 80 MB Module - 96 Megs (rather get more RAM)

    Dedicated Server, 512 Megs RAM, 40 MB Module - 92 Megs
    Dedicated Server, 512 Megs RAM, 80 MB Module - 128 Megs

    Dedicated Server, 1024 Megs RAM, 40 MB Module - 128 Megs
    Dedicated Server, 1024 Megs RAM, 80 MB Module - 192 Megs
    Dedicated Server, 1024 Megs RAM, 120 MB Module - 256 Megs

    hope that helps. Note that if you run multiple server instances on your machine, every instance is going to allocate the cache you tell it, so be careful...
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Oct 18, 2004
    #1
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