Hi! I was wondering like the title sais, if Skyrim will use up to 4 gb of ram ( after patch 1.5 ) on a 32 bit windows or if I need windows 64 bit to take advantage of this? As far as I know the max RAM use for applications in a 32 bit os is 4gb, but I have read contradictory statements on Skyrim, some saying it will only use 2 gb on a 32 bit windows even when patched.

Skyrim has an upper limit of about 3.1 GB of RAM usage, which if exceeded just about guarantees a CTD.

The amount of RAM that Skyrim will use in a 32-bit environment is dependent on how many background apps and services are running in Windows. The advantage to a 64-bit OS for Skyrim is that Windows can use any amount of RAM beyond 4 GB to run these background services, freeing up more RAM for Skyrim to use.

Since Skyrim has LAA enabled, it can use up to 3GB on 32 bit OS and up to 4GB on 64 bit OS. That's theoretically. Without LAA the limit would be 2GB regardless of the OS.

However Skyrim tends to crash when it exceeds 3.1GB, a bit of annoyance for some.

Ah thank you for clearing that up. I'm looking to buy some more ram for my system and was wondering if it's worth installing windows 7 64 bit ( Have been using 32 bit since I only have 2 gig of ram at the moment ) . Guess I will be getting 4 gig extra then for a total of 6 gig and upgrade to 64 bit.

If you upgrade to x64 the http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/38649/? mod might be worth a look.

Actually you could install Windows 7 64bit with 2 GB of ram. It won't be quite as responsive as if the system had 4 GB of Ram, but more than likely it will not feel any slower than the 32 Bit version.

Gaming should show very little difference, if any. (meaning that if you have only 2 GB of ram, you will not see any major difference if it is a 32 or 64 bit system.)

------------BUT

if you install more ram, for example 4 GB on a 32 bit version (so, only about 3.5 GB usable) and on a 64-bit. Seriously...the question is how will Windows 7 run, not how will 64-bit run vs 32-bit.

You won't be able to tell the difference between the two.

For more ram, Windows 64 Bit is the way to go. !!!!!

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and last but not least, that:

Windows 64 bit, in this case the WoW64 subsystem emulates only the 32-bit environment (that's how 32 bit applications working in a 64 bit system) through an additional layer between a 32-bit application and the 64-bit Windows API.

In some places this layer is thin, in others a bit thicker.

For an average program, you may expect 2% performance penalty because of this layer. For some programs, it can be larger.

Two per cent is not very much but keep in mind that 32-bit applications work a bit slower under the 64-bit Windows than in the 32-bit environment."