is the pagefile useful for gaming with 12GB ram

[Hassan Ahmed95]

hello i just wanted to know if the pagefile is useful for gaming i have a 12GB 1333ghz kingston RAM and a 4GB of vram gtx 970 when i turned off the pagefile i felt some difference like the games are better and smooth....so does this have any relation with the pagefile off or i am imagining 😀

 

[Solandri]

A year ago I would've said the pagefile makes no difference. Then I ran into pagefile-induced stuttering in a game even though I had gobs of free RAM.
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2840888/move-paging-files.html#16846922

Yes this was exaggerated by the WD drive parking its heads every ~8 seconds. But the fact remains that the OS accesses the pagefile even if you still have unused RAM, and while the OS was waiting for the HDD to respond to this access request the game display froze. If the pagefile is on a SSD this probably doesn't make much difference unless you're a professional FPSer. But if it's on a HDD and the HDD is being used while playing the game, I can see it causing occasional significant stuttering and framerate drops.

Really bad things can happen if you have no pagefile and use up all your RAM (from extreme slowdown to BSOD). So if you're going to turn off the pagefile, make sure you have plenty of excess RAM.

 

[Hassan Ahmed95]

A year ago I would've said the pagefile makes no difference. Then I ran into pagefile-induced stuttering in a game even though I had gobs of free RAM.
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2840888/move-paging-files.html#16846922

Yes this was exaggerated by the WD drive parking its heads every ~8 seconds. But the fact remains that the OS accesses the pagefile even if you still have unused RAM, and while the OS was waiting for the HDD to respond to this access request the game display froze. If the pagefile is on a SSD this probably doesn't make much difference unless you're a professional FPSer. But if it's on a HDD and the HDD is being used while playing the game, I can see it causing occasional significant stuttering and framerate drops.

Really bad things can happen if you have no pagefile and use up all your RAM (from extreme slowdown to BSOD). So if you're going to turn off the pagefile, make sure you have plenty of excess RAM.

thank you for your reply.....i don't know.....when the windows is not used in the task manger i see only 2.5GB is used and 9.5 are free so there is a space but if i should let the page file on....should i let it allocate it's space automatically or i should set it by a certain space?

 

[dfk]

it's best to allocate a fixed size for the page file to prevent fragmentation. since you have 12GB physical RAM, even 1GB pagefile for min/max should be enough for crash dumps.

 

[Hassan Ahmed95]

it's best to allocate a fixed size for the page file to prevent fragmentation. since you have 12GB physical RAM, even 1GB pagefile for min/max should be enough for crash dumps.

so i set the initial size 1024MB and maximum size 1024? 😀

 

[dfk]

it's best to allocate a fixed size for the page file to prevent fragmentation. since you have 12GB physical RAM, even 1GB pagefile for min/max should be enough for crash dumps.

so i set the initial size 1024MB and maximum size 1024? 😀

yup same value for both, you can change it later if you want. The reason to set min/max to same amount is to prevent the OS from changing the size everytime causing it to fragment your HDD.

 

[Hassan Ahmed95]

it's best to allocate a fixed size for the page file to prevent fragmentation. since you have 12GB physical RAM, even 1GB pagefile for min/max should be enough for crash dumps.

so i set the initial size 1024MB and maximum size 1024? 😀

yup same value for both, you can change it later if you want. The reason to set min/max to same amount is to prevent the OS from changing the size everytime causing it to fragment your HDD.

that helped me....thank you