bosquetor0602 wrote on 2025-05-03, 22:30:

Serious Sam First Encounter 2001 maximum 363503616 Real ram used after conversion: 347 MB […]
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Serious Sam First Encounter 2001
maximum 363503616
Real ram used after conversion: 347 MB

Serious Sam Second Encounter 2002
maximum 473137152 Real ram used after conversion: 451 mb

bosquetor0602 wrote on 2025-05-03, 22:51:

GTA Vice City 2003
Maximum 362405888
Real ram after conversion: 346mb

Thanks, I've added all of those to the second post.

Also, I've tested Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007) and found that it uses 935 MB.

Gta vc needed a min of 256mb ram to run, and recommended at 128mb. So 90mb in hdd swapping

Gta 3 will be an interesting test, it had 96mb for min and 128mb at recommended. If it followed the same style as gtavc, the mem requirement should be below 120mb at max

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-05-04, 08:18:

Gta vc needed a min of 256mb ram to run, and recommended at 128mb. So 90mb in hdd swapping

Gta 3 will be an interesting test, it had 96mb for min and 128mb at recommended. If it followed the same style as gtavc, the mem requirement should be below 120mb at max

I did the test for GTA 3 already my friend 😀, I got around 438mb of ram, interesting to see that it uses more ram than Vice City, considering that Vice is a game released later around 2003, maybe the developers did some adjustments there.

In other subject, this may sound silly but would there be a difference if I test the game in other video settings, like resolution, drawing distance, etc? I know this area is more Gpu bound, but would be interesting to see how much ram it uses if for e.g. instead of playing at 1600x900 full draw distance, to play at 800x600 with low draw distance, as I said it may be no difference at all because it is more gpu dependant, but maybe it does something different, I will give it a try just to be curious. 😄

bosquetor0602 wrote on 2025-05-04, 08:53:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-05-04, 08:18:

Gta vc needed a min of 256mb ram to run, and recommended at 128mb. So 90mb in hdd swapping

Gta 3 will be an interesting test, it had 96mb for min and 128mb at recommended. If it followed the same style as gtavc, the mem requirement should be below 120mb at max

I did the test for GTA 3 already my friend 😀, I got around 438mb of ram, interesting to see that it uses more ram than Vice City, considering that Vice is a game released later around 2003, maybe the developers did some adjustments there.

In other subject, this may sound silly but would there be a difference if I test the game in other video settings, like resolution, drawing distance, etc? I know this area is more Gpu bound, but would be interesting to see how much ram it uses if for e.g. instead of playing at 1600x900 full draw distance, to play at 800x600 with low draw distance, as I said it may be no difference at all because it is more gpu dependant, but maybe it does something different, I will give it a try just to be curious. 😄

I think using minimum system requirements also includes minimum graphical settings, as well as mininum resolutions. One test should clarify that aspect

I just tested The Witcher (2007) and it takes up 1396 MB on my system.

And this was at the start of the game, during the initial fight with the bandits.

bosquetor0602 wrote on 2025-05-04, 08:53:

I did the test for GTA 3 already my friend 😀, I got around 438mb of ram, interesting to see that it uses more ram than Vice City, considering that Vice is a game released later around 2003, maybe the developers did some adjustments there.

In other subject, this may sound silly but would there be a difference if I test the game in other video settings, like resolution, drawing distance, etc? I know this area is more Gpu bound, but would be interesting to see how much ram it uses if for e.g. instead of playing at 1600x900 full draw distance, to play at 800x600 with low draw distance, as I said it may be no difference at all because it is more gpu dependant, but maybe it does something different, I will give it a try just to be curious. 😄

might be worth a try as it might be caching more things in memory, even so that 438mb might be what the game takes up but it may not all be used, if played on a 256mb systems would it really request and then page the rest? I remember playing some of theses early.mid 2000's games on modest systems at 1024*768 and similar res without any stuttering or slowdowns - oft indicators of hard disc swapping

Call of Duty 2 - throwing in this texture pack exhausts most of the addressable memory on 32-bit XP, only had about 100 MB of RAM free out of cca 3,2 GB, need to mark CoD2SP_s.exe as large address aware and add /3gb switch to boot.ini. That is using the IWD files alone without launcher, no idea to what extent the launcher modifies the game, but it's a 64-bit EXE that makes the game run through some D3D9 to Vulkan wrapper and adds some shaders. I didn't figure out how to access its settings, it said I'm supposed to press '' to access the settings. I'm supposed to press what?

What puzzles, do textures just fail to load properly with non-hacked engine or are most visual differences really in shaders effects or are they somehow needed for textures to look right? The launcher makes the game run poorly on my PC on current OS versions. I'm not a fan of adding a bunch of shaders to old games, textures are nice if faithful to original and crisper.

Can any of you maybe try this tool on Supreme Commander? I remember reading somewhere that this game would sometimes crash on 32-bit Windows, even though it was a 32-bit game.

Apparently this was because the game was quite memory-heavy for its time, and it would sometimes run into the 2GB application memory limit in 32-bit Windows.

On a system running the 64-bit Windows, each 32-bit application could be given up to 4GB of RAM, and this 32-bit game would run stably on 64-bit Windows (on a system with 4GB or more of RAM) as a result.

If rammon reports a memory usage anywhere near 2GB for Supreme Commander, that would confirm the plausibility of this story.

I wonder if other games at the tail-end of the 32-bit era suffered similar stability issues on 32-bit Windows for the same reason.

digger wrote on 2025-05-07, 16:11:

Can any of you maybe try this tool on Supreme Commander? I remember reading somewhere that this game would sometimes crash on 32-bit Windows, even though it was a 32-bit game.

On my system, Supreme Commander takes up 1056 MB at the very start of a 4 player skirmish game, using the largest map available.

I imagine RAM usage would likely rise as the player and the opponents create more buildings and units, but I didn't have the time to test that.

digger wrote on 2025-05-07, 16:11:

Can any of you maybe try this tool on Supreme Commander? I remember reading somewhere that this game would sometimes crash on 32 […]
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Can any of you maybe try this tool on Supreme Commander? I remember reading somewhere that this game would sometimes crash on 32-bit Windows, even though it was a 32-bit game.

Apparently this was because the game was quite memory-heavy for its time, and it would sometimes run into the 2GB application memory limit in 32-bit Windows.

On a system running the 64-bit Windows, each 32-bit application could be given up to 4GB of RAM, and this 32-bit game would run stably on 64-bit Windows (on a system with 4GB or more of RAM) as a result.

If rammon reports a memory usage anywhere near 2GB for Supreme Commander, that would confirm the plausibility of this story.

I wonder if other games at the tail-end of the 32-bit era suffered similar stability issues on 32-bit Windows for the same reason.

Many, MANY modern games that crash to desktop are because they're hitting the 2GB limit.

As said in the first post: this does NOTHING on its own if you have a 32 bit OS. You need to modify the OS to change from a 2GB limit to a 3GB limit (which is different between XP and vista - the instructions in the OP are for XP)

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/la … 56/post-1712375

Supreme Commander had this problem when nearing end game and there were 1000s of units.

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/la … 56/post-1712729

Some more reading: 2-4GB game memory limits and solutions

I tested a few more games today:

• Max Payne 2 (2003) - 410 MB
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) - 432 MB
• Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines (2004) - 1102 MB

So yeah, you could still (mostly) get by with 512 MB in 2003, but it wasn't enough for some of the more demanding games released in 2004.

🤣, still had only 256 MB by the time Call of Duty 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted were released. Took about 5 minutes for maps to load in these games.