8GB Large Address Mod help

[peckham]

I stand corrected :biggrin:

[KarthGalin]

So I've been trying to get the 4GB mod to increase the memory address size to 6 or 8 GB.

 

why do I want this?

1) I have 16GB of memory

2) My cpu (PhenomII 955 @ 4.1 Ghz) and graphics cards aren't going over 50% load at any one time, and I still only seem to get @ 15-20 FPS.

 

I have two water cooled 6970's crossfire'd to three monitors, but as they aren't hitting high loads, I'm taking a stab at the memory being the bottleneck.

 

I've been trying to adjust the 4gb mod, but quite frankly I'm a bit confuzed. any help would be bueno.

 

And needless to say, hours of hunting for one that already exists has come up fruitless, unless I didn't use a good search term.

 

Like others have said, Skyrim's a 32 bit application so it can't use more than 4gb at a time anyway. What's more, I doubt it is reaching that ceiling even with that kind of setup. Try Elys MemInfo if you want to find out for sure.

 

You should check your load per core instead of overall cpu useage. Skyrim only tends to use 100% of a single core, ~50% of a second, and doesn't really make much use (~20%) of third or fourth cores, so this could show as your 50% cpu useage. If you're not using Skyboost (no link handy but search around), use that; it should help alleviate the cpu bottleneck.

 

Are you using high anti aliasing + SSAO + 2k texture pack etcetera? 2gb vram is decent but you might be running into a vram bottleneck if you're using a bunch of that type of thing.

Edited January 4, 2012 by Karth Galin

[kingchris20]

32bit windows can only use upto 4gb, if he's using 64bit the applications he runs will use whatever is available so long as they are laa enabled (which 1.3 skyrim now is)

 

I was assume from his statement of having xfired water-cooled gpu's that he hasn't neglected to install the 64bit version of windos :biggrin:

 

Hahaha! I told you I was a noob and that probably sounded stupid! but yeah I am a recent console convert, just started PC gaming last august.... But this is good to know, bring on the 8Gb!

[kingchris20]

Guys, the amount of RAM that an application can address is not only limited by the operating system you use / the amount of RAM that you've got available, but also if the executable itself is 32-bit or not.

 

In the case of Skyrim, the game's executable is 32-bit, so the 4GB switch is the best you can get on a 64-bit operating system.

It CAN'T allocate more memory than that. :U

The only way you can get the game to make use of 8GB or more would be to recompile the executable so it's a 64-bit one, and since Bethesda is the only one with the sourcecode of the game to accomplish that, you won't get the game to use that additional memory no matter how many flags you try to set on the current 32-bit app.

 

ahh well, maybe I was understanding the whole 32 bit thing correctly.........:( hopefully Bethesda will do a 64 bit executable in the future, probably unlikely though...

[KarthGalin]

Guys, the amount of RAM that an application can address is not only limited by the operating system you use / the amount of RAM that you've got available, but also if the executable itself is 32-bit or not.

 

In the case of Skyrim, the game's executable is 32-bit, so the 4GB switch is the best you can get on a 64-bit operating system.

It CAN'T allocate more memory than that. :U

The only way you can get the game to make use of 8GB or more would be to recompile the executable so it's a 64-bit one, and since Bethesda is the only one with the sourcecode of the game to accomplish that, you won't get the game to use that additional memory no matter how many flags you try to set on the current 32-bit app.

 

ahh well, maybe I was understanding the whole 32 bit thing correctly.........:( hopefully Bethesda will do a 64 bit executable in the future, probably unlikely though...

 

I'm not aware of any games that currently ship with 64 bit executables, though I don't keep up with things like Crysis 2 or and whatever else is currently at the bleeding edge (Arkham City?). It just isn't necessary yet. Even with a lot of mods and graphics settings above Ultra, Skyrim's peak memory useage hasn't hit more than 1.6gb while I've been watching.

[MofoMojo]

Guys, the amount of RAM that an application can address is not only limited by the operating system you use / the amount of RAM that you've got available, but also if the executable itself is 32-bit or not.

 

In the case of Skyrim, the game's executable is 32-bit, so the 4GB switch is the best you can get on a 64-bit operating system.

It CAN'T allocate more memory than that. :U

The only way you can get the game to make use of 8GB or more would be to recompile the executable so it's a 64-bit one, and since Bethesda is the only one with the sourcecode of the game to accomplish that, you won't get the game to use that additional memory no matter how many flags you try to set on the current 32-bit app.

 

Finally same sanity is spoken. If anyone else is truly geek enough to do it, I recommend reading Mark Russonovitch's Windows System Internals. I think any edition after the 3rd edition covers memory management for a windows process on both 32bit and 64bit architectures. Regardless, 32 Bit applications are given ONLY an address range between 00000000 and FFFFFFFF in which to operate, thereby 0xFFFFFFFF translates to 4,294,967,295 Bytes or 4GB. There is no way to extend it beyond this means.

 

-MM

Edited January 8, 2012 by MofoMojo

[MShoap13]

Try setting the core affinity for Skyrim for cores 0 and 2 (the first and third core). A lot of people on Quad cores see a considerable FPS boost by doing so. You could also try some other combinations such as the the 2nd and 4th and may or may not see different results.

 

Also, be sure to get TESVAL (available here) or, even better, SkyBoost (available over on the Bethesda forums). Without these, the game uses a bunch of old instruction sets that really don't take advantage of what processors post 2001 can do.

 

Onto Sli/Xfire. While these do double the number of GPU cores, shaders, ROPs, etc. you really don't gain a considerable boost to overall vRAM as both cards load a lot of the same information simultaneously to avoid latency issues when calling for resources. In fact the majority of the vRAM you gain (between 2% and 5%) is from the fact that each card's frame buffer is cut in half because each card only draws half of the scene. However, you should find 1GB generally sufficient for gaming provided you aren't using overly large texture packs. 4k and 2k textures are generally a huge waste of resources as the eat exponentially more RAM with little to no visual difference in-game thanks to monitor resolutions and mip mapping.

[teklanika]

Lol... your memory isn't the bottleneck. In fact, having more than 4-6 gigs of decent DDR3 RAM is a complete waste outside special cases. (i.e. CGI, high res photo editing, video editing) Skyrim only uses a tad over 2 gigs in the MOST EXTREME cases, texture mods included.

 

Your bottleneck is that AMD processor.

[DefaultKashou]

Got the same Graphics cards and i found that turning crossfire off improved my FPS, doing negative scaling for some reason.

[cloudancer]

If you are being limited by hard drive speed (which is implied by the question), you could try loading skyrim into a RAM drive. With 16GB you should be able to create a 10-12GB RAM drive. That would hold all of skyrim plus a number of very large texture packs.

 

With that configuration I assume you are running SSD in raid? If not, get some as that would be by far your biggest limiting factor for performance in and out of Skyrim.

 

If you are running a lot of textures you could also build your own BSA files which would speed up access over using loose files (improve load speed of textures, etc). This wouldn't be as important with a RAM drive, but would help with SSDs.

 

You may be having problems with CPU rendered shadows in that configuration because Skyrim is known to not offload shadows to the GPU(s). You could try turning them down/off for an easy test/fix. One way to detect a CPU bottle neck would be to launch task manager, tell it to graph your cores individually and see if any of them are running near full speed. For reference, my configuration isn't as beefy as yours, but I'm completely CPU limited on an overclocked i7-920.

 

Finally you could use Elys's meminfo (available here) to tell you how much ram you are actually using (and determine if it's your limiting factor).