[SOLVED] Pagefile vs RAM - Is Pagefile worth it?

[xerxesaria]

I play a game (Cities Skylines) which, especially during load times, uses a huge amount of RAM, close to 14GB at times. It takes up to 5 minutes to load a new blank game.

My specs are (Omen laptop):

16GB ddr4 SDRAM 2666
i7-8750H @ 220ghz 9mb cache 6 core
Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
250GB SSD
1TB HDD (where I have saved C:S)

During the game, if my city grows and more items are used, I get FPS drops from a consistent 20-25 FPS to sometimes 8-9 FPS. I also have the occasional stuttering which mostly recovers rather quickly.

I have turned V-Sync off to allow for NVidia G-Sync to take over.

I have learned that upgrading my RAM to 32GB won't change much IN GAME, but loading time may get a bit faster.

However, I have recently heard that PageFile could help speed load times and the in-game speed.

At the moment, my PageFile is at factory settings; "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" is checked (On) and the "Currently allocated is 24576MB".

1. What are your thoughts about PageFile?

• Is it for old PCs?

• Is it worth setting PageFile manually to 48GB (48000MB) for example?

• Is PageFile system wide or is it per hard drive? (i.e. Can I set it up on or for my SSD)?

Thank you for any advise.

 

[USAFRet]

No.
The pagefile is for when the system runs out of physical RAM. And that pagefile reside on your drive (HDD or SSD), and is monstrously slower than actual RAM.

Setting it at "48GB" simply means that space is taken out of your actual drive space. Likely the system will never use it.

Whoever told you it makes things faster is deluded.


If you have your WIndows OS on the HDD instead of the SSD, you need to change that. Your OS will run much faster if it lives on the SSD.