Does more than 256MB RAM make a difference with Win 98?

[The Rusty Gamer]

Does having more than 256MB RAM make a difference with Windows 98. The general opinion seems to be "No" but the reason I'm wondering is that I have just upgraded from a PIII450 to an Athlon 1.6. I thought I'd try this thing out with some big settings on games to see what would happen.

I tried Cossacks: Back to War with biggest map and 8 players. Fine at first but definitely slowed down after a while.

Also, Civ 3 - PTW. 256x256 map and 24 players. Didn't play it for too long, generally smooth but began to notice some delays at end-of turn. May become more problematic towards the end-game.

I ran Championship Manager 01/02 and maxed out on the leagues (all 16). Now, the manual says you can use all 16 with 256MB RAM but it never got to the starting point. It virtually ground to a halt while trying to inititalise the data and when I killed it with an alt-ctrl-del there was a "not responding" message on the task list.

Surely I wouldn't need even more speed to remove the remaining delays. But would more RAM make a difference to the above games? That is the question. Can anyone tell me?

BTW, my graphics card is a GeForce 2 Titanium.

[Urban Ranger]

Well, since the Championship Manager test didn't even get to the actual start, it seems like you could use more than 256MB RAM. Since Windows 98 won't use more than 512MB, anymore memory is pretty much a waste.

[DrSpike]

I thought win98 wouldn't use anymore than 256MB (or even less, some used to say 192MB).

Why don't you get XP or 2K anyway?

[The Rusty Gamer]

Because (apart from costing money) I've read to many things about problems playing games with later versions of Windows.

If you have XP, then you HAVE to get more RAM because XP eats up so much more for itself. Never mind 512MB, proably need 1GB. Again, this costs money. My budget allows for a few future purchases of games and not much else while I'm not working.

[DrSpike]

Fair enough..............but I would say that win2k (my personal choice) can be acquired quite easily, and that the driver support these days means there are much less problems than if you tried it soon after win2k was released.

An extra 256MB of ram is not very dear as well, and you wont 'need' 1GB.

[Maquiladora]

I have a pretty much identical system to yours rusty, with win98se 1.6 athon xp 256mb ddr and ive seen computers benchmarked on a similar system with winXP get much higher scores on quake3 etc :\ but considering last time i tried winXP it froze up randomly i cant be bothered to route out the problem until i buy more ram. BTW i have no trouble playing all 16 leagues on foreground in cm01/02, most of the time any winblows OS will say CM isnt responding but it just needs to wait, but your wait sounds abnormally slow or mine is unique...

[Urban Ranger]

It also could be the case that your HDD is near full, or you have too many programs running in the background.

[Standup]

It will make a slight difference but not very much and its probably more cost effective to move to Windows XP. W98 isn't really designed to access more that 256MB, I think the limit for W95 was 96MB. No idea what it is for XP but a lot of motherboards probably put the limit at 1GB.
CM01/02 should run ok with your machine spec - it was fine on my P3 700 with 256MB. I'd try less leagues. I just ran England and Scotland and it wasn't too bad. I also turned off my virus checker and didn't run anything in the background.

[The Rusty Gamer]

I don't have anything really much running in the background. Where it slows down is when it gets to calculating shortlists. I suppose I should just walk away and read a book or do something else while it's setting up and see if it finally is ok.

I still have about 20GB (10 on each drive) available so disk space is not a problem here.

Urban Ranger said Win98 will use 512 RAM. Others are saying 256. Who is correct? Who is an authority on this?

And can anyone answer about the slowdown on other games?

Since some people seem to want to be able to play with more than 16 Civs on CIV III (they're talking about 64 with XP2) then I assume these same people do not have a performance problem. What's their secret?

[Urban Ranger]

512MB RAM. You could probably stick in more, but not worth it IMO.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Thx UR but the question still remains - will games take advantage of the extra RAM if they can?

For instance, in Cossacks, the manual states that they recommend 256MB RAM, especially for the larger (16x, 2x2, 4x4) maps PLUS 150-200MB of spare hard disk space for virtual RAM swapping. But there is no indication that if you have 512MB RAM that the RAM swapping will no longer occur.

BTW, ran CM01/02 again, selected all leagues and left it to intitalise while I took a shower. When I came back, it was ready to begin the game so I CAN play with them all. Saved the game for later. Don't know how long it might take to reload the save though or how the processing speed will be, even with a 1.6GHz.

[Urban Ranger]

Demand paging occurs when the OS runs out of RAM when it needs to load something into memory. That means no swapping is needed if there's sufficient RAM available.

Swapping is decided by the operating system, not by programs running under it.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Thks again UR. So, in other words, I could speed up Cossacks (and possibly Civ III?) by putting in another 128 or 256MB RAM.

Now I think about it, the slow initialisation of CM01/02 could be because of disk-swapping as well.

[Jamski]

I'm running win98 with 512megs RAM, and it seems to help with "big games" like playing civ on a huge map/32 civs

-Jam

[DrSpike]

Why the nick change?