Well, I learned something valuable today and I thought I would share it as "#stutterstruggle" seems to be a prevailing theme in PC gaming these days.One of my biggest complaints of late, was my traversal stuttering in Hogwarts Legacy. It wasn't super bad per say, but it was extremely annoying to the point where it made me regret buying the game as I am not really a fan of the Harry Potter Universe to begin with. The traversal stuttering was extremely repeatable regardless of how many times my character crossed through particular areas.
I also noticed that sometimes certain textures would be slow to load. This one was extremely perplexing, because how could that be possible on an RTX 4090 with gobs of VRAM? And my rig has a 13900KF and 32GB of fast DDR5 7600 as well. After several patches from the developer, the issue improved but was never fixed, so I put that down to the game's poor resource management due to bad programming and vowed to never buy another game from them again.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor had similar behavior in fact, but I put that one down to being "undercooked" out of the kitchen and after a few patches, all would be well.
If only things were so simple, but it turns out a large part of these issues was caused by a Windows configuration error believe it or not. I have 4 NVME SSD drives in my PC:
1) SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB (this is my C:\)
2) SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB (I use this drive for newer games only)
3) Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (Another game only drive)
4) Samsung 960 Pro 1TB (I use this drive for older games only)So when I built my PC, one of the questions I had in my mind was whether I should put a Pagefile on each of those drives. I have known for a long time now how important a Pagefile can be to Windows, but I decided to use the option "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives."
That turned out to be a frigging mistake!
Turns out, that for the best performance, ALL drives should have their own individual Pagefile. And this makes sense, because why would a game being played on say for example, my games only Platinum P41 be required to access or store data on the pagefile in my C:\ drive? The latency penalty would be huge!
But more than that, since enabling Pagefiles on all of my SSDs, I have noticed a MASSIVE reduction in traversal stuttering. In Hogwarts Legacy, I have noticed at least a 90% improvement in that area, which is astonishing!
Every single game I tried, whether Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor etcetera had a huge improvement, as verified by the MSI Afterburner frametime graph.
How is this possible you may ask? It turns out that Windows needs the presence of a Pagefile to utilize system memory more efficiently. For example, before I put a pagefile on the SSD where Hogwarts Legacy was installed, I noticed some odd behavior in terms of how it was using my RAM and VRAM. As I said earlier, I put it down to the game's poor resource management algorithms, but it turns out that Windows was restricting memory usage due to no Pagefile on the drive.
After creating a Pagefile, Hogwarts Legacy now uses WAY more RAM, but less VRAM. It uses above 20GB of RAM now with the Pagefile enabled, but without the Pagefile it would use about 16GB max and then over the course of prolonged gaming, Windows would decrease RAM usage down to as low as 8 or 9GB which would worsen traversal stuttering. I understand now that this was because Windows was attempting to not run out of memory due to not having a Pagefile on that drive.
So I hope this enlightens the forum as to the importance of having a Pagefile so that Windows will use the system RAM to the utmost efficiency
I wonder how many PC gamers are like me and have multiple drives in their rig, but only have the Pagefile on their C:\ drive and are wondering why their games stutter so badly?
Olvik, ira1234, Ohmer and 9 others like this.
