How does being limited to 2GB of System RAM usage affect the game?

You can always easily LAA-patch the .exe to have 4 gb's of RAM support...

But in any case, I guess the game will be optimized for low-RAM environments, AKA 360/PS3, so I wouldn't worry...

it really shouldn't have any effect at all. the only real difference between pc and console will be better textures for the pc which only requires additional gpu resources not RAM.

It won't have much of a big impact, not that you can't patch it to support 64bit.

It's just another thing for people on this amazing forum to complain about.

If you patch the executable you can get over 2 GB, up to somewhere around 3, definitely not higher than 3.5 though.

It means if Skyrim.exe tries to use more RAM than that the game will most likely crash, or if not other errors show up. It basically limits the amount of content that can be stored at the same time, so think mainly about textures, they tend to take up a large part of the memory. I'm quite curious how much RAM vanilla Skyrim uses.

EDIT: I should clarify that this will not be a problem unless you start using mods with extremely large textures, and/or lots and lots more objects in the loaded cells, and/or increase the distance at which objects/terrain become their LOD version (ugridstoload in Oblivion.ini).

Considering the vanilla more than likely won't use more than 2GB RAM, it won't effect the game at all. If the game DID use more than 2GB of RAM, they would have included a 64 bit version. Since this isn't the case, it's impossible that the vanilla game would use more. So it's a complete non-issue.
Bethesda wouldn't release a game that used more RAM than the executable allowed. That doesn't even make sense.

Now, throw in mods, and extremely high res texture packs, and yeah, it might start to be a problem unless you use some sort of patch that ups the RAM capacity for the exe.

How do you do that?


And I'm not complaining, just wondering...

Generally a patch that changed the LAA flag in the executable. Usually its as simple as a batch file in which you would drop the old exe into and it will make the change for you.

He clearly wasn't complaining... Just asking. I too wanted to know the answer

Yeah, just like the batch files that change things around that remove the disc check to the exe, so you can play without the disc. Drop and drag, initiate file, done.

Thank you.

That is not the same as a x64 bit version, the executable will still be limited by the 32 bits range of addresses. At a 32-bit system, Windows' full capacity of addressing RAM (including video RAM) is 4GB, so to make sure the operating system has enough memory for itself it limits executables to 2 gigabytes of RAM. At a 64-bit system, you can change the LAA flag to remove this imposed limitation, and the executable can make use of the full range of addresses possible with 32-bit, 4GB. If it were a 64 bit application there would be virtually no limitation.

So, does this significantly dampen our ability to mod?

Can someone confirm or refute this please:

Having 4GB means that the OS and other background processes will operate in the extra 2 GB, giving Skyrim a FULL 2GB, instead of 2GB minus memory for OS and background processes.

Well, it depends on the mod but when I ran oblivion modded it used around 3gb total and when I downloaded NMC's high end texture pack for nv, I would crash every 15 min or so until I downloaded the tool that enables LAA and lets it use up to 4gb and I haven't had a crash since.

Not really, only in very specific mods, i.e. extremely high quality texture replacers or mods that put areas so insanely chock full of objects that this limit is reached. I wouldn't worry about it.




That's correct. The only exception being unless your OS and background processes need more than their 2 GB, then they'll probably start using the 2GB of Skyrim. If you close the applications that you're not using when playing Skyrim that won't happen though.

Thanks for the confirmation. Just wanted to make sure that having the extra ram isn't exactly wasted.

4gb is what is supported on 32 bit systems, and xboxs have way less than that and they can still play the game fine

I wasn't saying you were complaining, personally.

What I mean is that people on these forums seem to overstate the 'bad' qualities of a game that isn't even out yet, while not giving credit for all the things they fixed and did an outstanding job with.

On the contrary, you might have performance troubles if you had less. Are you on a 32-bit system btw? If so, you must realize that the 4GB RAM limitation includes video RAM. So if you have a 32-bit system and 4GB "normal" RAM, only about 3 to 3.7GB "normal" RAM will be recognized by your system. Skyrim will still be allowed to go up to 2GB by default though, as long as it's available. It's not something to worry about, you'll still reach the recommended specifications, just saying to give you the right info.



I know little about consoles, but you can't make such a comparison just like that. I run windows 7 64 bit, and right now only have my browser, messenger, a bunch of folders and my standard background applications open and my system uses 1.9GB RAM already. I'm sure the default usage of Xbox is very low. In addition to that, I'm also pretty sure that the Xbox's RAM is used less often, reading more directly from the disk. Running vanilla Oblivion takes about 500 MB RAM on my PC, which is already about the maximum capacity of the 360.

I do hope they make the game LAA, though. Since they've confirmed it as Steamworks (grumble), I'm sure the DRM won't be very happy about me modifying the executable.

You're not really modifying the executable code, just the header of the file. It should be fine I guess, and you can play it in offline mode. I'm sure none will prosecute you for it.