Got 4gigs Vram, skyrim crashes at 1.5 gigs used

[Bilgwacker]

Hey folks. Been modding Skyrim for almost a year now and been loving it from the get go. I started with a gtx 460 with 1 gig of vram and quickly realized that wouldn't fit the bill ram wise. I upgraded to a gtx 760 with 4 gigs of vram instead. For some reason though when I hit around 1.5 gigs, the textures turn black and purple, then CTD's. I use GPU-Z and GPUShark for the monitoring and they both display 1.5 when the game crashes. Now I dont have the best system in the world and was wondering if I dont have enough in other departments of the system. My specs are: Intel Celeron G530 @ 2.4GHz, 4 gigs ddr3 668MHz frequency ram, ASUS American Megatrends motherboard, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. I do plan on getting a new system but this crash at 1.5 gigs When I have 4 gigs is getting under my skin and was wondering if anyone had some advice on what could cause this. Thanks for your time.

[obobski]

There's a number of reasons you can't "use" all of the RAM in there, the quick'n'dirty is:

 

- DX9 requires VRAM to be backed by system resources (MSDN devnet rule of thumb is system memory should be at least 2x VRAM).

- Skyrim, as a Win32 application on a Win32 environment, cannot map and access 4GB of memory (it wouldn't leave anything for Windows or any other application).

- The GPU drivers will do "stuff" wrt memory mapping for cards with >1.5GB VRAM on Win32 systems.

 

It's also entirely possible the crash is unrelated to VRAM and could be due to some other factor. Because of that, I'm not saying run out and buy more RAM or something along those lines, because even if Skyrim is hitting its head on a memory cap, the bigger "limit" here will be 32-bit Windows. Under a 64-bit environment you could flag LAA and the process can go up to 4GB by itself (if the system can support it), which may or may not help what you're running into. If unloading mods and turning settings down gets you a more stable/playable game, I'd say go that route and if/when you decide to get a new computer, re-visit this.

 

The other thing to keep in mind is that application reporting of VRAM usage is usually not very accurate because there is not a good mechanism within DirectX to specifically read physical VRAM usage (because the API doesn't make significant any distinction between on-card and off-card resources - they're abstracted and managed thru the driver and API). As a result, different applications, graphics cards, and drivers will report different things for the same game/workload and the differences can sometimes be dramatic.

Edited October 2, 2015 by obobski

[Bilgwacker]

Thanks for the info Obobski. I will turn down some settings but mostly I will upgrade my system to 64 bit OS.

Edited October 3, 2015 by Bilgwacker

[alucryts]

I was able to solve a lot of crashing issues by simply optimizing my SKSE.ini and ENBlocal.ini files.

 

http://warzones.skyrim.modunion.com/enhancing-your-system-memory-and-you/

 

I am able to use about 4 GB VRAM out of my 6 as measured by HWinfo64. I went from 15 second CTD to a CTD so rare they might as well not exist after following that link. Although I have a 64 bit windows 10 with a 980 ti with 6 VRAM and 16 GB physical RAM....so I have a bit more head room.

 

I will say that you having a 32 bit system is going to seriously limit how much RAM you are able to use. A few hog mods and you will CTD when you run out of space.

Edited October 5, 2015 by alucryts