Low FPS? Ailos' guide to having a better experience.

[Electrofreak]

I fired up PS2 in 32-bit Windows XP with 4 GB of memory during Beta and noticed it was hitting the 2 GB memory cap for a user application.

I threw Windows into 3 GB mode (this is done via adding a /3GB switch in your boot.ini, Google it) but the game wouldn't start; it began telling me that my Radeon 5770 was incapable of running PS2. I figure that the 1 GB of video memory was no longer being addressed properly by the OS. I of course switched Windows back to the standard 2 gig user application mode and the game had no issues starting again.

I saw a thread pop up recently proposing this as a solution to some of the crashing and latency experienced by users running a 32-bit OS. I was surprised to see that nobody else reported the problem I experienced, and that /3GB mode apparently resolved some of the crashing issues users were having with the application writing to memory (which makes sense as this could be related to the addressable memory limitations imposed by a 32-bit OS).

Some also noted a notable performance improvement as the game was now able to use more than 2 GB of memory.

This is kind of a severe tweak that could have other unexpected consequences (you're essentially stealing memory away from the OS when you do this) but I thought it worth mentioning for those desperate 32-bit OS users. The tweak is a little different on Vista or 7, and the thread used an application to make PS2 "large address aware" but I believe it's already flagged as such.

EDIT - Add disclaimer: I am not responsible for anything that may occur as a result of making changes based upon my post above. I don't consider it a dangerous change but it directly impacts the amount of system memory your OS has to work with and can produce stability issues as well as OS malfunction.