I'm sure many of you with great PCs including myself love to load up Skyrim with a 12gb texture folder. Game looks pretty for sure, but there is a major flaw in the game engine or maybe Directx9, Skyrim mirrors textures in the system RAM as well as the VRAM.

Either way Skyrim can only address up to 4gbs of ram and no the ram shown in Skyrim performance monitor or task manager is the "working set". What I and many others have found is that at about 3.1gbs of ram usage in task manager; usually means Skyrim has hit 4gbs of ram usage.

Boom crash, everytime Skyrim hits 3.1gbs of ram usage.

Now I don't have a weak machine and no my mods arn't causing this issue. I have made a clean install of Skyrim with just texture packs and the issue is quite predictible. The game slowly creeps up from 2.2gbs of usage to 3.1gb. The engine isn't very good at purging memory either but the main issues is the limits and I believe Skyrim would be a lot more stable if it were to use more then 4gbs of ram.

The only way Skyrim will allow us to have a lot of texture mods is if Bethesda make the game 64bit. Look I know I'm asking a lot Bethesda but I can't enjoy this game without modded textures. I have tried optimizing them, downgrading them all to 2k etc but the memory this game uses just builds up and up without purging.

Bethesda I urge you, I really want to enjoy this game again but with this and the lipsync issues I think I'm going to have to shelve it, shame too I still haven't played dragonborn.

Maybe if we can get this thread popular, just maybe Bethesda will notice it.

Maybe.

More on this issue at the S.T.E.P forums, I can't link it but it's under the support and trouble shooting and it's called "CTD at 3.1gb"

It would be nice if they could just snap their fingers and make that happen. However recoding the game's engine means recoding the game and they have moved on. More than likely to Fallout 4 and a small team is more than likely working on the next TES game (as there is always seems to be a small team working on their prime IP's.

If your system is using 900 MB's of RAM, you can try a Clean Boot to recover resources.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796

Some even go so far as to turn off Pre Fetch if they have more than 8GB RAM and a SSD. I dunno about that, but it can't hurt to try it.

I feel your painman. However after a lot of testing I think I've found some small measure of sanity with the issue. You'll have to look for it but check for a program named cleanmem. There's a freeware version that gives you 7 days free where you can set the program to scrub your memory considering the TESV.exe. This keeps your memory usage down and it does help I've noticed. If it works well for ya pick up the full program after the 7 days @ 4.99.

Anyway..some free info for ya.

64-bit is not needed nor is it feasible at this current point in time.

Let's no forget that some people are still playing on 32 bits pcs.

Nevertheless i don't see why somebody should install 32 bit over 64 bit.

In today standards except that the device drivers must be digitally signed for 64 bit, i don't see any other disantvantages over the 32 bit.

But they are many 32 bit disantvantages against 64 bit systems. (lower Physical memory, lower user mode process, lower system cache. etc.)

And maybe if somebody have some older 32 bit programs that are incompatible with 64 bit.

But speaking about of games...i would say 64 bit is the new standard today. (and it handles memory and HDD better than a 32 bit system.)

So, people who have 32 bit computers should not be allowed to play Skyrim?

Under normal circumstances, the 4 GB limit is just fine. For the majority, there is no need to have a higher limit.

In order to make it a 64-bit executable, licensing would need to be renegotiated as you cannot link 32-bit and 64-bit code, the code would need to be overhauled for 64-bit data types, and at least twice as much testing to ensure everything works on both systems with the modified code.

As for stability, it's fine. I've only had one crash with the game and that was due to a bug in the Steam Overlay.

As for the actual memory limits of Windows, see this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx

This discussion has come up many times in the past. Compiling a 64-bit executable is not as simple as flipping a switch and it's not necessary except for a minority of players. However, an argument can be made to have a 64-bit version of the CK as that can use up more resources than the game at times but that's something else entirely.

lol..i don't say that, i only say (my opinion) it would be much preferable to play on a 64bit system as in a 32bit environment.

(considering you have a 64 bit operating system, and a 64 bit processor.)

In your opinion, when will we have 128 bits systems?

Do you think maybe in the future.

Beside that they are other games that gain profit from more RAM.

On a 32 bit system you can't even max out 3.7 GB without using a huge amount of "memory" on your pagefile.

And pagefile is slow because it depends on your HDD conditions, except you have a SSD drive and again RAM is much more faster, but volatile... no power, data gone.