Dear forum readers !

My laptop isn't a very recent one, but still was top of the line some years ago : Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, Nvidia 8800M GTX, 3 GB RAM w/ Vista 32.

I experienced many slowdowns with corresponding intensive disk access and sound cracking, so I reduced the detail level from the default "high" to "medium", and the screen resolution from 1920x1200 to 1024x768. Alas, the slowdowns and corresponding disk access are still there. I even lowered the details to "low" but finally reverted to "medium" since there wasn't any significative change.

The intensive disk access occurs on the system drive while the game is installed on another disk, and occurs when the game quits too, so I suspect it's paging like hell, which would indicate there's not enough virtual memory. Considering I have 3 GB of RAM, could that be possible ? Put more simply, is my computer too weak to run this game ? Or is there anything I could do to solve this ?

That was also my first idea while reading your problem, but 3 GB RAM is definitely enough. If you're running out of memory, then it's not Lucius alone.
Try some standard things like:
- Closing down everything else while running the game (especially anti-virus software)
- Update your graphics drivers
- Check free drive space on C:\
- Check C:\ for errors (btw, does the disk access sound louder than usual?)
- Check your System Log for errors, especially drive errors
- Check the size of your page file (use 3-4 GB)

Thanks for your reply !

Everything you mentioned is OK except for the graphics driver update which has not been done since one year or so, and which I'm always reluctant to do. Nvidia updates don't always go for the better...

Maybe it's worth noting that I don't run Lucius with admin rights. Is there any reason why it may cause problems ?

EDIT : Another thing worth mentioning, the slowdowns and disk accesses become clearly worse as time goes. If I quit the game then restart (the game, not the system), it's back to a more acceptable state. Maybe the solution is to quit every time I finish a chapter ?

Hmm, this also speaks for a memory/paging issue. Maybe something is causing a memory leak. As Lucius doesn't do this on all Vista systems, there must be another component involved.

According to your graphics card, you're using a laptop. Some games don't work as expected when there are several GPUs present at a time. Does your laptop have both, a built in graphics chip (e.g. Intel HD) and the Nvidia 8800M GTX? If so, try forcing the game to use only one of them. Embedded GPUs usually use shared memory, so that might be a component that causes paging.

It's also worth a try to explicitly run it as Administrator (right-click => Run as ..), just to see if it makes a difference. There are indeed some games here on GOG that suffer performance drops when they aren't run with admin rights. But it's almost always also dependent on the actual system and not a standard issue.

My 8800M GTX is the only GPU here, so no problem on that side.

As for running the game as admin, I have to say I hate that, and eventually I've always managed to get a game running properly without needing admin rights. By "properly", I mean "with the same gaming quality I would get running it as an admin"... So maybe I will try, but don't count on me doing this, I will far more likely restart after each chapter and be happy with that, which I would probably have to do anyway.

In the case my system denies some privileges asked by the game, is there any way I can see this, a log file for the game for example ? I doubt it comes from denied filesystem writes, since I checked with UAC virtualisation activated which almost always solves this (and it didn't change anything), plus denied fs writes usually give other symptoms...

Haha, nothing one would guess in the first place. So it's an paging issue after all ;-) By increasing the user virtual address space, you automatically decrease the system's address space, as 32 bit systems can only handle 4 GB which are split between system address space and user address space. Increase on one side means decreasing the other. As soon as system components need more space than reserved paging increases as parts of the memory have to be written back to your disk (page file). If your GPU wouldn't have come with it's own RAM, you'd have hit this problem even sooner.

Thanks for the feedback, his might indeed help some other readers.

I'm back with the results ! But they're not quite concluding... Eventually, the slowdowns + disk writes seem to occur more often and start sooner, but are slightly shorter too.

This gave me the idea to check the file header of the game executable, and discovered it's flagged to use more than 2GB of virtual memory. More and more 32-bit games have the same setting nowadays, but this often means they're going to be memory intensive... from a 32-bit perspective at least ! On a 32-bit Windows, such a setting can typically benefit from an increase of the user virtual address space to more than the default 2GB (on 64-bit systems this doesn't apply, since 32-bit apps get a full 4GB user va space).

That's why I set the OS loader value increaseuserva to its maximum, i.e. 3072 (before starting this thread I had it set to 2560, which was enough for Company of Heroes), and eventually there were less and shorter slowdowns than both previous settings, but still some unfortunately.

So finally, I'm afraid I can't do any better. I'm even back to the default Windows setting, since I've been aware of some problems reducing the system's virtual address space can trigger, and don't have replies on this subject yet. Maybe if I had 4GB of RAM this setting could have been more efficient, but at the time I bought my computer I thought (wrongly it seems) having 4GB was useless on a 32 bit system.

Suggestion : Maybe having an option to trigger cleanups or "garbage collecting" more often for poor people with not enough RAM would help ?

Anyway, as a conclusion to people experiencing the same problem (likely on 32-bit systems), you're invited to try the following and keep it if you like it :

1) Start a command line prompt as an administrator (right-click, and run as admin)
2) type the following, then enter :
bcdedit /set increaseuserva 3072

3) Close the command line prompt window
4) Reboot

If you don't like it and want to go back to default user VA allocation, do the following :

1) Start a command line prompt as an administrator (right-click, and run as admin)
2) type the following, then enter :
bcdedit /deletevalue increaseuserva

3) Close the command line prompt window
4) Reboot

Hope this helps !