Hogtied by lack of memory?

I've been away from the game for about a year (maybe 1½?), but just got back into it. It's enjoyable again.

Except...hardware requirements seems to have gone up a big lot?

I have limited options to upgrade my PC, so I'm looking for ways to get the best of the scraps I have.

I think there are two problems: A Radeon 5670, which is not very powerfull tbh. And 2 GB RAM.

But mind you, this used to run fine when I played COH2 back then after the release and first patches.

Now - not good. I can hear my HDD go crazy when a multiplayer game is loading so I'm guessing that's disk cache due to lack of memory. This gives bad delays untill the game is up and running.

Does anyone have good advice on this. Except the obvious investing in a new rig or a 1000$ video card. It's not an option.

Thanks.

When it comes to options without buying new gear further information would help. What's your CPU? What settings are you using to run COH2? What kind of frame rate are you getting? Have you tried re-installing?

In the general world of gaming you could do with some upgrades. Do you have a budget you can work with?

If you look into it I'd upgrade your RAM as it's pretty cheap these days, 2GB RAM is not that much these days. Depending on where you are in the world prices will differ. Upgrading to either 8-16Gb and you won't have to worry about RAM for quite a long time.

Again depending on where you are in the world prices will vary but a new Graphics card would help you out immensely. In the general world of gaming you could probably do with an upgrade here too.

Depending on where you are you are in the world you could get some upgrades at a pretty cheap price. Here in Australia 16GB RAM would be less than $90AUD and an R9 270x OC 2GB, would set you back $200AUD. For less than $300AUD your problems could be solved, assuming the rest of your gear is up to spec.

All settings on minimum except resolution and graphics quality (66%. It's unplayable at 50%).

CPU is Intel quad core 2.4 gh. That's probably not the bottleneck.

I could perhaps add RAM. Not sure, but will have to see. It's the cheaper solution than a new graphics card.

But I'm also looking for hints on what to do with windows Vista or something. There must be some RAM huggers I can get rid of or what?

Resolution can be a big killer for frame rate. It would be worth looking into lower resolutions to find better frame rate.

To be honest I can't help you too much with Vista. I basically skipped using it on my home or work PC's. I can however say that on release 2GB was a sweet spot for running vista but over time this has scaled to 4GB and then onto 8GB. Of course depending on whether you have a 32bit or 64bit version will change what you can do with it.

CoH2 will want to use all of that 2GB of memory leaving your PC scraping the bottom of the barrel for system resources. I would set everything to its lowest possible form and work my way up to find a frame rate you can work with.

All settings on minimum except resolution and graphics quality (66%. It's unplayable at 50%).

CPU is Intel quad core 2.4 gh. That's probably not the bottleneck.

I could perhaps add RAM. Not sure, but will have to see. It's the cheaper solution than a new graphics card.

But I'm also looking for hints on what to do with windows Vista or something. There must be some RAM huggers I can get rid of or what?

I really have to back up Mirage here. 2GB RAM is nothing even for an office computer these days. For a gaming computer, you're absolutely crippling yourself. Paging your hard drive is always an awful experience and I can 100% guarantee it's happening here. RAM really is dirt cheap, and easy to install. In fact, you'd probably want to outright replace your existing sticks with newer ones in order to avoid potential incompatibilities. You'd need to determine whether your system takes DDR3 or the older (and more expensive) DDR2 though, given how old your computer sounds. And if you're running 32-bit Vista, your computer will only see less than 4GB of RAM anyway.

FYI, the game's system requirements did go up with the release of WFA. The new units have higher textures and polygon counts. In addition to system RAM, the game is also quite demanding on video RAM (the RAM on your videocard, which can't be changed). Your video card would almost certainly have only 1GB or less. I'd recommend 2GB minimum to run this game on lowest settings. This means your video card is paging to your already overfilled (and much slower) system RAM.

You can find out more about video RAM in my post here.

Sounds like you have a q6600, it should be adequate for coh2. But you most definitely need to do something with your ram situation. I'm about 95% sure it will be ddr2.

Well, the Q6600 was around the switch between DDR2 and 3. Nevertheless, 2GB of Ram is just not sufficient anymore, for anything "online".

And we're still talking about some 8 year old CPU, and 5 year old GPU, with a Ram amount from 10 years ago - not really surprising it doesn't run that well.

Thanks.

Yes it's a q6600 and unfortunately a 32-bit system. So aiming for higher than 4 GB won't work anyway with Vista?

My plan was to wait for the next windows and then get new hardware. That's around end of 2015 AFAIK.

Oh well, at least I could look for those extra 2 GB I guess. Being that little I guess it should be cheap enough. If I can find it at all.

Well you could always "Get" a 64 bit copy of either Vista or Win7 or even Win8. But lets not get into that too much.

Yeah I'd be getting that extra RAM at the very least, 2GB of DDR2 should be easy to find.

Keep in mind that Vista keys are compatible with 32 & 64 bit installation discs.

Btw.: is there a switch to use with the launching of COH2 so it skips the intro?

Yup there sure is.

In Steam, Right click Company of Heroes 2. Select properties. Click on set launch options. Type in -nomovies and click OK. Click close. Run game.

Thx

Well, here's a follow-up in case someone else happens to be in a similar situation.

2gb DDR2 costs me about 60$. So affordable enough. Will have to wait and see how much it accomplishes.

Another thing I am doing meanwhile, is to kill resident programs in the the task list. Things you install along the road may be added to your start programs and eat up bits of memory. Not much, but enough still significant if you run on the edge. Oh, and resident programs may also be stuff that sits and checks for update and what not. This will also slow your game down even if the memory usage of said resident program are quite small.

But one single program turns out to be the biggest burglar of scarce RAM. If you are guessing Windows, I'd say good guess. I did too, and Microsoft does fill up with some stuff that you could do without.

However the thug is actually Steam. It uses 3-4 times as much memory as any of the Windows applications!!! Shame on you, shitty Steam, which is basically nothing more than a platform for commercials.

And this is new. It used to be a small application that did not load so much more that an interface and rest was web based.

We now shoot at COH for raising its requirements - which is true when you look at graphics- - but in the case here of my computer a big change from two years ago is also what Steam requires.

I still dislike Steam despite all the comfort it offers for access to many games. It's too restrictive and too often updates and file validation simply don't work.