Looked great to me! Much better than the videos I was putting together lol! Thanks for doing that. Camtasia looks like a great recording app btw!
Will have to try it. So, you didn't have the LAA patch enabled, Right? Just want to be sure. Also, would it be ok to link your video to the 1st page?
Giving you credit of course :goodjob:

EDIT - Watched in HD this time, man that Camtasia app is perfect for youtube videos! What was the final file size for that?

EDIT - Posted it! Thanks man. You'll see it at the top of the OP

Thanks

Yes it was without the LAA patch. And feel free to put the video in the OP. It would be absurd to deny people to watch a video about a crash :foodndrink:

I cannot read much of the opening post because of the colors used; on the Oblivion skin (mostly tan), many of the colors are unreadable. Because of the variety of skin choices on this forum, using colors to emphasize anything is a very poor choice, as it will make it more difficult for some to read.

hmm, I thought I was doing us all a favor... I just see gray and black on the forums... Well, I suppose I could change it.

EDIT - Changed it, let me know if it's easier to view

Thanks much easier to read.


So it just might not be Oblivion that is multi threading for me after all. Moved my INI and let Oblivion generate a new one...Still using 4+ threads. SO whether or not the multi threaded changes are made to the Oblivion INI Win 7 still Spreads all the data evenly!


So I am gonna test with both a default INI and my Modified one. To See if one lasts longer or is smoother or what .

While playing Oblivion all 4 cores heat evenly.


Edit:

Forgot to say ...nice Video. that was UNmoded Oblivion? Took a lot to get the memory up there I can do that way faster just running from cell to cell....lol

Now it's utterly impossible to read.

Down at the bottom of the screen, there's a choice for which forum skin you want to use. The default is black/dark gray, but there are others - a green (the old standard, long time back), a blue, a red, the Oblivion one (a tan, paper-textured one), and the current default that started when FO3 came out. Between these choices, there is simply no color that will be readable on all of them. For that reason, using the COLOR tag at all is a poor choice, because it's guaranteed to be hard to read for someone.

(EDIT: looking again, there are a lot more options down there than I remember. Heh.)

Oblivion mostly only multithreads significantly during special occasions like cell transitions, saved game loading, some menus, etc.

The threads are not anchored to any particular core, and run where-ever windows tells them to run. On my machine, Windows XP changes its mind about which core the main thread should run on several times per minute. Thus, it won't have very long to heat up any particular core before it migrates.

Well, just to be sure, I deleted all color tags in the HTML code.
Everything should be colorless now. Let me know how it looks.

thanks

So I am starting to gear up some testing ideas on how LAA handles video memory (if at all)
I know, I know... Let me explain...

http://img38.imagefra.me/img/img38/2/2/17/far327/f_jmqp9ff403vm_1c94578.jpg

So you will see in that pic that I should have

• 1024mb of dedicated video memory
  
• 1791mb of shared system memory
  
• 2815mb of total available graphics memory

Here is my thought on this. Now that we have Oblivion able to utilize up to a
total of 3.8gb using the LAA 4gb patch, this can only mean that Oblivion should
take advantage of more available graphics memory if we exceed our dedicated.
Windows should allocate that shared system memory to what ever needs it.

This means that there is potential for 2815gb of video memory available for Oblivion!
(or at least that is the amount I have avaialble.)

My idea on this is to max out my texture memory as I high as I can before it
causes instability and crashes. Hopefully I can make it utilize more than 1024mb!

This would be good news for those people that have loads of extra physical system memory
not able to get used by Oblivion because of the 3.8gb ceiling that LAA creates.

If anyone has some thoughts on this, I would love to hear them!

@far327:
As far as I know the video memory and the actual 4gb offered by LAA are 2 different things.
Video memory is handled by internal DirectX routines and are only limited by the OS(3GB on XP(and I think you must do something specific to XP itself in addition to LAA), 4GB on Windows 7/Vista 32 bit and virtually unlimited(bigger than anyone has ram for anyway) on a 64 bit os(Win7 64bit and Vista 64 bit)).

LAA only unlocks the 4GB "normal" memory usage to 32 bit programs, video memory is not counted in that total and is not affected by the LAA patch.

edit:typo

So, good news, so far so well with the 4GB patch. I have not experienced one CTD with my setup so far and using BC, QTP3, all UL, improved everything for textures. I have noticed my VRAM getting up to 1058 in the waterfront according to in-game Oblivion tdt and no crashes or anything. Never seen my game be so stable, I don't know how accurate the in-game display is in Oblivion for VRAM, I have heard it is not so accurate but I was into the 1058-1088 range for well over 5 minutes and did not experience a crash so that may back up your ideas there far327.

On a side note and potentially unrelated note, I HAVE experienced two game lock-ups so far, but never a CTD which is odd. I have experienced this with my old install as well but attributed it to mods not being installed properly, VRAM saturation, etc. but when the game locked-up I checked Oblivions memory usage and I was only at 1.4gb (I think OSR helped A LOT.)

Have/Do any of you experience lock-ups of the game, where the video will just freeze and you have to ctrl-alt-delete. I am a little worried it could have been one of the last batch of mods I added in that caused this. It doesn't seem to happen too frequently so far so this is good. Sorry for hi-jacking the thread somewhat, but this seems like a good place to ask since we are discussing memory usage and I have a hunch it could be related, as I have not heard too much about Oblivion freezes/lock-ups like this unless there is some underlying problem, never heard of it happening related to mods. So just wondering, any of you get lock-ups or have ever experienced one for that matter?

Thanks!
-J

@JamRock990 -

Well, my first thought would be that your freeze ups could very well be caused by exceeding your available VRAM.
But I have never done this before so I don't know what happens once you do exceed this.

My next thought would be to ensure you install all the latest drivers for you components.
If you are running Windows7 or Vista even, both of those OSs can be pretty rude about driver installations without
asking your permission. Never trust windows update to install the proper drivers for you components.

Are you overclocking any hardware?

Other than that, I would run a memory test using Memtest+86.
You would need to download the .iso file and burn it to a disc.
Then boot from the disc and let it run for at least one hour.

Glad to hear you CTDs have at least stabilized. Curious about your Vram

Ok. So it's dumb question time here.

The 2GB limit on 32bit processes. Unless I misread somewhere, this 2GB isn't for each process, it's the entire pool of address space available to the user, right? The Windows kernel takes the other 2GB for itself. Referring to XP here as it's what I have.

So Oblivion ate 1.7GB. On your task manager, what made up the missing 300MB? You had some other program there running that was wildly fluctuating between 35MB and 250MB and I'm sure it didn't play nice with Oblivion when the time came for the game to need more.

So the 2GB needs to be thought about a bit more, and explains why clean-boot procedures help since there would be little else taking up user address space.

Looks great, awesome! I'm gonna go read it now.

Read it. Excellent work.

Not going to bother with it, personally; I have not had a CTD in years, since I play with 2 mods loaded (the two I'm working on), and never run the game for more than a minute or two at a time.

The 2 GB limit is for each process. The 2 GB is of address space, not necessarily memory. But since memory is normally mapped in to address space, it functions as an upper limit on the amount of memory that can be used by normal means for any single process. Address space can also be used for memory mapping files or other memory mapped IO, or reserved for funkyness. The amount of address space you have is independent of how much physical memory you have. You are a 32 bit process therefor you have have 4 GB of address space, though Windows steals 2 GB from you to make things easier on windows and device drivers, so you have 2 GB of address space.

That's a fairly annoying way by the M$ programmers.

Anyhoo, not only Oblivion.exe benefits from this nice little patch. The CS executable does too (Construction Set to the un-nkowers). The CS always used to crash for me when its swap file usage reached 1.7 GB, especially annoying when working with the heightmap editor. Not so any more. Most excellent little patch this is. :goodjob:

I have Windows 7 64-bit and 8 Gigabytes of Ram. Programs that take up 2 GB shouldn't be an issue :confused:

After doing some testing of my own to try and exceed my available video memory, I never experienced a lock-up. I have 1024mb of memory available and was able to reach 1250mb and sustain that amount for an hour. My game never CTD or froze. I'd say you can rule out your video card vram usage as the issue. I'd look more at drivers, over heated video card or bad memory. It may help to post your load order as well. Maybe start a new topic on it.

This leads me to my next BIG announcement!! :celebration:

My theory about LAA allowing Oblivion to take advantage of available system memory to use towards VRAM was right!
Windows 7 and Vista users will be able to exceed past there dedicated VRAM using the LAA 4gb patch!!! I'm not sure
if the same will work for XP users yet. I will test XP next.

Basically, this means that users with low VRAM can take advantage unused system ram and won't have to stress about whether or not
they can run HD texture mods, etc. It's also good news for those that have modded their games to the point of nearly exceeding their dedicated VRAM.
If your video card is powerful and simply lacks VRAM, this is great news for you! :foodndrink:

I will be posting details and a video tonight!

You are stuck http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1004123

(Section Tools )

That's good news.

Means I need to upgrade my ram to 4gb though.(I only have 2.8)

Great! thanks! Although I have one request... Could you maybe drop or re-word that I developed the 4gb patch solution? I wish I could say I did, but all I did was Q/A'd the hell out of Oblivion to see where it breaks from lack of memory and then gave the patch a home for us to download in the forums.

Thanks though, really appreciate being added to your great OP!

Does fallout 3 have this same problem?

Hmm, don't know. Never played Fallout 3.

But, I would say it most likely does based on this file available over at FalloutNexus

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6510

Not sure if that patch would work better than the one I linked to. I guess try
reading the comments on the download page and see if people are reporting
good results.

I used the Fallout 3 enabler on my Oblivion.exe, and nothing aploded.

Both file probably do the same thing.
Actually the LAA patch changes only 1 byte into the PE header of the exe file, yes 1 byte .