Why does Frostpunk 2 lag so hard when the city expands?
Once the city hits Tier 3 zones, my ADATA ValueRAM 4GB DDR4 2666 just gives up. The system starts hammering the slow HDD swap file, making every camera zoom feel like a slideshow. I watched my RAM usage lock at 96% - 98% in Resource Monitor, and killing background apps did absolutely nothing. I tried lowering shadows first, which gained me a pathetic 3 FPS but didn't touch the stuttering—it was a total waste of time. I eventually dove into Advanced System Settings and manually set the virtual memory initial size to 8192MB and the maximum to 16384MB. In Resource Monitor, the commit charge expanded from 7.2GB to 14.5GB, and those violent frame drops during panning finally chilled out. I actually messed up at first by putting the page file on a mechanical drive, which doubled my load times until I moved it to the SSD. Now, RAM temps stay between 38℃ - 42℃ and CPU load fluctuates from 72% - 81%. Using performance analysis tools, I confirmed the swap frequency dropped and frame times finally stabilized at 5.1ms - 6.4ms.
