I have WinXP SP2, P-4 1.8 GHz, 256 MB RAM.



It appears that GTA III is damaging my RAM. The game is really very heavy but my computer is well ahead of its recommended settings of atleast 128 MB RAM. But the game runs disc II of audio, which puts a lot of load on CPU and RAM, and thus it appears that my RAM is going damaged because earlier the game used to run smoothly but now it takes a much longer time to load. Moreover, graphics in the game have gone worst. I cannot see anything clearly. Earlier audio used to run without interruption but now it interrupts a lot after few seconds.



My computer do not have any anti-virus software which may be doing this problem. Any solutions to keep my RAM alive while playing this game?

why you dont' have any antivius progs?
There are some good freeware ones available for home computers (home versions).

Intsally Avast Antivirus and Zonealarm to your system for start.

Asa for the rest i am not sure if i understand you correctly but you run some kind of audio CD in background? if so then switch it off. It could be that you need more power for graphics. Also i dont' know the game itself, yet i know that some games tend to take longer to load the more you progress. such as Arx fatalis, where quick save/load is not so quick anymore as you progress in the game. probably because of the large number of object it has to memorise and because save files are over 6.8MB big.

If that doesn't help then make sure you dont' have any unnecessary processes running in background (such as some scandisk or something).

by audio CD, I mean the Disc 2 of the game. It is a two CD game and it requires disc 2 to be inserted each time while playing the game. To decrease loading times, I was running it using Daemon Tools, but nothing is working.... :cry:

saying that a program damages your ram is foolish.
stop that ! IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE AT ALL!
I suggest you format your disk, install the NEWEST drivers for your hardware, install an antivirus and continue...

I have already done that. My Computer right now has only Windows XP SP2, Motheboard Drivers and GTA III, Winamp and Office.
I have already formatted my harddisk, bcoz this game was giving me troubles earlier too. But nothing seems to work.

I don';t have Antivirus installed bcoz my home computer these days is not connected to Internet.

then perhaps your m/b is ready to say goodbye....

didnt you choose QUICK format button?
NEVER DO THAT
choose complete format
if yes, and want to keep your data alive, use defragment tool built in windows

does any other games suffer simmilar problem, if yes do this^
if no, thatwill be in gta maybe? but thats strange

dude... i hate to point out the obvious.. but 128 MB of WORK RAM is NOWHERE enough for GTA... get another 256 module, and get going..

I have 512, with 256 allocated to the AGP-bus, and i could chopp pretty good when there was alot going on at the same time.

Your CPU is also a slow one.

The thing that it would HARM you ram is just nonsence. Stop behaving like a baby and get a grip. Your computer is old, and you can't expect everything to run smoothly.

Heck.. i have a P4 3,2 HT with 512mb ram and a Gforce FX 5500 (256), and I concider updating it pretty soon, as i think it's starting to get out of date.

If you don't wanna spend money on hardware, you shouldn't whine when never programs doesn't run.

A 256 module doesn't cost any major money.. heck it's probably the single CHEAPEST upgrade you can do to your computer that gives it a MAJOR boost.

He wrote everything worked smoothly before Titan

Probably because he was at the beginning of the game and there was no real need of all that extra ram, but when he got further in then his computer began to be taxed more and more and can't follow without a downfall in speed?

Saying that a game damage your RAM is foolish. If it's really the case then buy yourself a new ram chip because your old one is going to die soon. As simple as that.

there s two possible ways how is vipins problem meant:

once he turned game on and after few minutes playng its freezing-theres of course not enough ram

or(how i understood it is)
one day he played GTA, everything worked fine. then after a week he played it again and it was not smooth, in that case i have comment eagle of fire's post:
did you play GTA? graphics and enviroment there are almost same whole game
in that case i think he didnt format his hard drive well

ehm i think WIndows could be also the cause. my bro had Win 2000 with 128MB ram - was hosting most HL mods and we had no problem. but once he installed the service pack nothing works as smooth as it did before. we even tried using old mod versions (which should have been working fine on 400Mhz pentium but they didnt'. because of the lag. and it's definatelly the service pack's fault.

Warning service pack 2 makes my 256 mb ram pc lag bad since service pack2 and extra seciruty are on it my xp disk unfortuantley has it intergrated so I would need 512mb ram to make it work when vista comes out untiul I hve a fast system I will not get it so i can cope with the service packs.

Before you accuse GTA II of being the problem, you need to be more specific about what exactly is the problem.

If the memory is actually bad, there will be problems with every program. If the problem is that the game does not run as fast as it used to is indicative of something else. If it is a campaign game, try restarting it at an earlier point. If it is back to normal, then wait until it starts to slow down. At that point, check disk usage. An early sign of too little memory is disk thrashing.

The operating system has 4GB* of virtual memory, but most of it is actually on the hard disk. The OS tries to keep the most likely used data in physical memory. Whenever it reads a memory location that is actually in the memory swap file (page fault), it swaps a data page in physical memory with the desired page in the swap file (hence the name). It is an art to guessing the least-likely-to-be-needed page in physical memory to swap out, as if you knew what it was, you could solve the halting problem, which is impossible. Different methods work in different circumstances, the best algorithm for office applications are terrible for heavy duty numerical processing and even worse if main memory is not large enough to hold the entire OS kernel. MS Windows benefits from disk controllers including caches of frequently requested blocks, which mitigates disk thrashing, but is not always enough in the face of code bloat.

GTA can bog down your system with a memory leak. A memory leak ocurrs when a program allocates memory to an object, but never gets around to letting the kernel know that it is finished with it. Eventually, the stack (dynamically allocatable memroy) is cluttered with blocks of unused memory that causes more swapping, because less of each memory page is available for programs that will use it. It is theoretically possible for runaway memory leaks to bring down the system. Depending on how the OS keeps track of memory management, killing the program can free up the memory, but a reboot will solve the problem. If GTA is bringing down your system with a memory leak, do not play for as long, save often, and stop/restart the game to release allocated memory

* assuming a 32bit OS and addresses limited to a single word (useless trivia: A single zero or one is a bit, eight bits is a byte, the number of bits in a full length instruction is the word length. A collection of less than eight bits is a nibble).

I agree with rbell. If it was the ram nothing would work right not even windows.

Buy some more RAM it's cheap, if you want real speed get an extra GB of RAM.

Also one thing I have noticed XP professional runs faster than XP home

thanx everyone for the suggestions . I think upgrading the system is the best option.

:kosta:

Well just because i can brag..........I have 2 Gb of Ram =)