far cry

1gb of ram is enough for that game i've played it on rigs with as low as 640mb of ram and still played great. 1gb is plenty for that game. Another gig of ram wouldnt hurt you though, but i dont think thats your problem.

any clue what the problem could be then? again, no spike in the cpu or fps when the game stutters. but it really only happens at the start of the game when i enter a door or something and turn. i will play the game for longer this evening and see if the problem persists after a while. i've only played it for like 5 minutes max. but if the cpu spiked that could say something is wrong with the cpu, and there is still memory available, so i don't think that's it. the video card obviously shows good fps, so the only thing i can think of is the hdd or the cd rom. hdd is probably not it, maybe the cd rom is too slow? i have no idea how a slow cd rom could affect that game...

Vram is video card memory. I'm not saying the VRAM or RAM is the problem, but that the stuttering you speak of is definitely Memory (or hdd) related.

When you install a game, all the textures, geometry, wireframe, everything is put on your HDD. When you play the game, it read primarily from the HDD, the CD is secondary, many times it's not even used when it's sitting in the drive, it's merely there as a form of security. So when you enter the game and look at objects, textures, anything, it's pulling that off the HDD and onto the VRAM, where it can be accessed much faster. A slow HDD is therefore suspect.

I should have thought of that earlier, alas I'm tired, and should really go to sleep.

i'm not even going to ask if you've been awake all night i remember those days...haha.



well the HD is a hitachi deskstar 7200rpm 80gb HD, but it's hooked up via IDE with a cd rom. does that sound like it could be a source of the problem in any way? i just don't know.



but, i had a problem when i installed windows...videos wouldn't play at all. so i just did a disk defragmentation last night (and it needed it). that defragmentation might make a difference and help the problem. pretty bad after a week of owning the computer and i already had to defragment. then again i did install about 15 codecs and uninstall them and a bunch of other crap trying to get the damn movies to play on my computer. i almost think i should reinstall windows after all that. what do you think?

Get the patches for Far Cry and update it to the latest version. They have fixed many issues.

where can i get the patches?

A 7200rpm drive is ample speed in itself. You could try EVO's idea and patch* the game up, might be the only problem.. A reinstall shouldn't be needed, you can run ccleaner's registry cleaner though, if you want, might clear out some unneeded entries.

*http://www.ubi.com/US/Downloads/Info.aspx?dlId=691

cool, thanks. btw, do you think the fact that the disk was pretty defragmented could cause the slow-down? i think it could, then again i don't really know and am considering that as the best possibility because otherwise i'm stumped!

Fragmented data can slow the hard drive down, yeah. But if you defragged, and the problems persisted, then you can sorta rule that one out..

oh, well i'm pretty sure i defragged and then went to sleep. i don't think i played after that. don't really remember. that was several hours ago.