Memory leak in XP

from Sins Forums
I'm having a pretty large memory leak occur. First my system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (single core version)
Windows XP 32-bit (latest service pack/fixes)
2 GB DDR-400 memory
Nvidia GeForce 6800GT (with various drivers tried, see below)
On-board Creative Live! 24-bit sound chip (with latest drivers)

When I first run the game, 1.37 GB of physical memory is free according to Windows Task Manager. Game starts, and generally plays fine, but after a while it starts to slow and start thrashing my hard disk as the page file starts to get used instead of RAM. Viewing task manager in game shows me nearly out of physical memory, yet the Sins game process DOES NOT show the missing memory. Once I quit Sins, the memory does not come back, and I'm forced to restart. This occurs in game versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2. Obviously that makes me think it's something in my system. I'm hearing there are similar problems with Vista 32-bit, but obviously I don't have Vista so that solution won't work for me. Having read some threads here that showed issues with some Nvidia cards I've tried a variety of recent beta versions of Nvidia drivers, but they all exhibit the same behavior.

I tested a wide variety of other games (using OpenGL & DirectX) and had nothing similar occur.

Great game though from what I've been able to play, so kudos to the developers.




technical
2,794 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Obviously that makes me think it's something in my system.
End of quote


I do not want to belittle your problem : just give you some feedback.

I run SINS on Windows XP 32-bit, also with a GeForce 6800 (December 2007 drivers : 169.21), but I only have 1GB of RAM.

What you describe never happened to me (and I have been playing this game since the June 2007 beta version). My hard disk has never been accessed with any annoying frequency. The game runs very smooth, with no stalls and stuttering.

What I do to minimize potential problems is :

1. Close all user-defined background programs (such as an antivirus) before launching the game (only the necessary explorer.exe remains). This reduces possible causes of interference.

2. I installed the game on a secondary hard disk (not on the primary C:\). I do not know if that helped. (I defrag both disks at least once a week.)

3. I play the game in a 1360 x 768 window (on a 1440 x 900) desktop, with all the graphical texture-quality settings defined at "highest", but I disabled a few minor features to unburden my system (the planet "elevators", the tiny asteroids, etc.). My 6800 handles the graphical workload very well.

4. But I have only tried maps with one star, 15 to 30 planets, 4 players. I do not know if 1GB of RAM and a 2½-year old 6800 model will cut it in a bigger "galaxy".

5. I run 3 different anti-spyware/malware programs regularly. If you have a "polluted" system, your hard drive will of course display weird activity, at times.

Good luck in fixing your problem : with 2GB of RAM and a 6800 GT, you should be able to run that very beautiful game smoothly.



Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I do not want to belittle your problem : just give you some feedback.
End of quote


No worries, I appreciate all positive feedback.

Luckily I think I can confirm that this is in fact a bug in the game having to do with graphical detail settings, possibly related to those Nvidia problems. Turning down the detail significantly seems to have fixed the problem. The FPS is fine at higher graphical settings, so I just left them on highest at first, but apparently the game leaks memory at those settings with my setup.

I'm going to try to figure out which specific setting it is next.
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