Witcher 3 - Sticky Keys pop up in combat annoyance - And runs on 8yr old system

[DaveLembke]

Just sharing in case others online run into this. I was playing Witcher 3 on my older gaming system to see how it would run the game on a Athlon II x4 620 2600Mhz with 4GB DDR2 800Mhz RAM with GeForce 730GT 2GB 128-bit video card and in the combat training it instructs you to hold down Left-Shift in combination with left-mouse click to strike harder. Well I guess I pressed Left-Shift 5 times and Sticky-Keys popped up. Initially I thought the game crashed when a pop up window displayed and game froze, but it was asking if I wanted to use Sticky-Keys. I ended up de-selecting the sticky-keys active when left-shift pressed 5 times to get rid of this problem. I was kind of surprised that game controls for Witcher 3 would have had where it would trigger sticky-keys for Windows 7 64-bit.

Fortunately the annoyance is fixed easily by unchecking the check box and applying the change to not have it pop up after 5 times that the left-shift key is pressed.

Performance wise, the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz CPU and nVidia Geforce 730GT 2GB 128-bit video card are kind of laggy. I have the better 8-core FX-8350 CPU system with EVGA GeForce GTX 780 ti 3GB 384-bit , and that runs Witcher 3 far better. Surprisingly the Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz CPU is not pegged to 100% for all 4 cores when game is running, but the GeForce GT 730 is weak and so there is noticeable lag. This CPU paired with a decent GTX card it would probably be better to play. Core activity for the quadcore showed all cores swinging between 40 and 60%with game running so its not pulling 100% to run Witcher 3. The 4GB RAM, all but 300MB was in use by the game according to graphic logger.

At some point I might test this system with Witcher 3 with the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 896MB core 216 superclocked edition and see how it performs.

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[BC_Programmer]

There is no way for a game/program to say "Don't activate sticky keys while I'm active", so the workaround some games use is to save whether it is enabled, disable it, and then when the game is closed, turn it back on if it was enabled before. It can disable the shift key entirely, with a low-level keyboard hook, but of course that can only work for games that don't use the key- this is what is used for the Windows Key in some games, for example.

Thing is, if the game crashes and the user wants it on, now it's off, so it can mess up preferences. I guess some developers have decided it's not worth it, or that most people disable the setting anyway.

[BC_Programmer]

Hah, so reading your post prompted me to fire up a game so I fired up Just Cause 3. Don't really utilize the capabilities of this system for running games. But it led to a rather interesting series of events, quite related to performance. But even more so, I discovered an issue that was the result of me not practicing what I've advised on this forum and elsewhere!

Now the game runs fine, absolutely no issues whatsoever with performance. But out of nowhere my displays went blank and the sound cut out. The System was still on- HDD light was blinking, etc. but I couldn't actually get either of my monitors back. (I did try plugging into my on-board to see if it recovered with that or something but no avail. I didn't lose anything important.

Now, my first thought was the Graphics card- given the symptoms, it seems reasonable, no?

So I give up and force it off with the power button and reboot, then take a look see in the event viewer. I was expecting to perhaps see errors about the Graphics card driver not responding. But I actually saw something quite different- Instead, I saw a message from "Resource-Exhaustion-Detector" stating that The system had run low on Virtual Memory:

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Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: JustCause3.exe (17680) consumed 8853925888 bytes, firefox.exe (16072) consumed 2104459264 bytes, and devenv.exe (21080) consumed 1013133312 bytes.
That's about 8GB, 2GB, and 1GB respectively.

Now, this leads to my mistake: I had actually turned off Virtual Memory entirely! (Thus my "Not following my own advice" remark). I f igured "it's 32GB of RAM, I can save disk space this way"

I figure the system just flat out ran out of memory and just couldn't complete the task switch from Just Cause 3 to the dialog Windows shows saying that it has run out of memory, so it got stuck.

Anyway, I've followed the advice I've been giving all this time and turned Virtual Memory back to System Managed.

[DaveLembke]

It can disable the shift key entirely, with a low-level keyboard hook, but of course that can only work for games that don't use the key- this is what is used for the Windows Key in some games, for example.

Interesting.... I have noticed that some games the windows key doesnt function to get back to desktop. Never thought that the game devs disabled it intentionally.  Thinking now it was probably disabled to avoid crash conditions. One such game that the windows key does not work in to get back to Windows desktop is Driver - Parallel Lines. I had an awesome game going and I paused the game and wanted to fire up fraps to record an insane car chase where I was having a bunch of fun with AI/NPC Cops. I was going to double back over an area in the game that i knew I could get an insane jump out of and land it back onto its wheels and keep going. Sadly windows key didnt function to get me back to Windows desktop to turn fraps on. So I had to exit the game, turn fraps on, and then launch the game and then navigate all the way back on the map to where I was that i wanted to do the stunt recording to record it in which then the tilde key worked to start/stop recording for fraps.

Interesting crash with Just Cause 3 and Virtual Memory disabled. I too what have thought that 32GB is plenty and to force it to all work within RAM vs Disk Swapping data would be a performance gain of not having up to 48GB of swap space for 32GB RAM. Somewhere I was reading, cant find the article now, but that  disabling swap space and forcing it to all run in RAM detracts from Windows performance because Windows wants to use Virtual Memory, so its actually being crippled by it disabled.

I had one system that was acting strange on me ( suspected SSD issues and with SSD issues serving back data to RAM improperly it was causing system crashes ) and I lowered the swap space to the bare minimum since it wouldnt allow it to be disabled completely so it was set to the 2-4mb for C: forcing it to run on mainly just RAM and a 4mb area of the SSD. The system behaved with this setting so I then knew it was a issue with my SSD. However Windows 7 64-bit was not as responsive as it was with virtual memory enabled. Sure it had only 4GB RAM, but with just the OS and Firefox browser, I did sense some lag to the system. The processor is a Sempron 3850 1.3Ghz quadcore and so to begin with the system isnt all that powerful, so crippling virtual memory on a system that was sort of crippled by design to be an electron sipper, it stood out as a performance loss on this system whereas a more powerful computer might not be as easily noticed.

One thing I havent tried yet is to see if I can set up a RAM Drive and have Windows pointed to the RAM Drive for its swap space. It would then force Windows to work in RAM and it would be happy with its swap space that by design I guess it works better with swap/virtual memory space enabled vs crippled/disabled. I havent done this yet because on a 4GB RAM system it wouldnt work out too well. I have a system with 16GB RAM though and that would make for an interesting test. Of 16GB I could have allocated 6GB RAM for system and 10GB RAM DRIVE for very fast swap space. Perform a baseline benchmark prior to this and then one after to see if there is any real gain. The only unknown that I have is.... the chicken or the egg coming first scenario. That is.... the RAM Drive would need to be available for Windows 7 to use for swap/virtual memory and would Windows 7 be happy with the swap space not being active until the RAM Drive service is started. I am thinking Windows 7 is going to have a fit upon reboot when the RAM Drive service is not active yet to give Windows 7 its virtual memory within RAM. * Its also kind of funny that its a mess of using RAM to help itself.  But Windows was designed to run on systems that didnt have a massive amount of RAM, and so Virtual Memory is deep in the root of its design to make the OS work without running out of memory.

The system with the SSD issue with virtual memory, I have since installed a HDD and the crash conditions have been far fewer than with the SSD. Also set the virtual memory back to system managed size.

Im kind of surprised that your system crashed running out of RAM. Recently on my older system with 4GB RAM, I have been getting low memory warnings when I have Windows 7 64-bit running Firefox active and Firestorm Viewer for playing around in a virtual world on Second Life. The low memory warnings suggest to shut off firefox. I skip past the low memory warnings that pop up on occasion and everything continues to work. When looking in the resource graphic log that runs, I see that the system only has like 300mb memory free. Additionally, the system is running on a 120GB SSD and it only has about 1GB free space on it, so since its set to Windows Managed Virtual Memory size, its likely having a fit because it wants to grow and its stuck within the constraints of the jam packed SSD. Maybe your system was going to warn you that its running out of memory like mine did, but the game took the focus and hid the warning.

[BC_Programmer]

Was wondering if anyone knows what happened to him.

It didn't truly crash, it just got into an unusable state. Sort of the same thing, but all the programs were still running, I just had no way of terminating or stopping them.

I suspect Windows was trying to show me the message you mention, but perhaps because of the low memory condition wasn't fully able to take focus from the game- or perhaps the rest of the system, having to redraw windows and such to draw the desktop, itself couldn't get sufficient resources to do so, and because it was confined to only using physical memory, it couldn't swap anything to disk to free up memory for basic tasks. After all, eeven to close programs or do things like control alt Delete, the systerm needs to allocate memory for the task manager or the security screen, but if there isn't a way to get that memory it can't really do anything.

The "Nowhere to swap to" issue is also why IMO the RAMDisk as Pagefile might not work so well, a s under the same conditions the same upper limit can be reached- no memroy to allocate and no persistent storage to slap discardable memory pages temporarily, if the RAM Disk pagefile is full.

There was a later "detection" event a few minutes later as well which suggests that everything was still running, even while the screen was "blank"; the HDD Light was occasionally firing up, etc.

I'm just glad my 1070 GTX isn't failing or having problems, I hate Graphics cards issues

[DaveLembke]

Scrolled through some screenshots and found the one the night that I ran low on memory and the system gave me a warning. I thought it was Firefox that it wanted me to unload from memory, but it was Firestorm the viewer I use for SecondLife. I clicked cancel I think and took my chances in a very low memory state. The screenshot shows that according to CPU/RAM gadget that I had 358MB of 4094MB free. And the graph shows that the memory was even lesser in the past as for the blue line in the CPU graph is the memory in use. The closer to the top of the graph window the lines are the closer to 100% utilization.

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