Hello Beth employees - can somebody tell me when the 4GB patch will come out? They said in the bethblog that it will come out last week but nothing happened

They said they planned it to come out, not that it will come out. Since then they've commented that it's still in testing.

Is this still the case? Still in testing?

Well, since we don't have it yet, I'm gonna go out on a really flimsy limb, I'm sure, and say that yes, it's still in testing. They probably discovered some unexpected problems from the LAA patch, and are working to resolve those. I'm sure they'll make it available as soon as they are comfortable that they've resolved any bad problems.

If it isn't here by Wednesday, I'll be surprised if we see it before January.

They have to make sure that it recognizes system ram so that people that don't have 4gb to spare don't get their systems crashing from the game trying to hog all the memory. There are some major compatibility issues implementing it into game vs. you downloading a launcher when you know your system can handle it. That said, they already have your money, so no rush.

I really can't think of anything in enabling LAA that would require.... additional testing.

It's not about pushing out an LAA enabled executable; it's about them not wanting the PC and consoles having different versions of the game.

They're more than likely releasing it as part of a larger patch and are testing the patch before releasing it.

The PC 1.3 came out over a week before the Xbox patch, and a week and a half before the PS3.

To avoid problems caused by people trying to run in configurations that they don't have, it is likely that this "patch" will automatically detect how much system RAM is present and run in the appropriate mode. How Bethesda is doing this is likely what is taking so long and requires testing on multiple configurations so that problems are less likely to be encountered. It's unknown whether there is anything more to this "4GB Tuning" update than making it aware of more than 2GB of RAM. If there are additional improvements or optimizations that the Creation Engine can accomplish with access to more system RAM, it's not hard to imagine that these optimizations would require some additional testing. But as we have no information as to what "4GB Tuning" is in this context, we are left to wait and see. As it was their intent to release this last week, unless they encounter serious problems, I would expect to see it sometime this week. January is likely to be busy for Bethesda, as they have to get the Creation Kit out as well as the next game update which will probably be much more substantial than any of the previous patches. For these reasons, I think they really want to get this "4GB Tuning" update out and in the wild so they can concentrate on what lies ahead.

In summary, be patient. It's been in testing, so until it's out or an update appears here or on the blog, it's likely still in testing.

We're only an imagination of ourselves...

There are plenty of threads in this forum that explain the difference between enabling the LAA bit and supporting it.

My guess is they ran into problems with testing machines that are running a 32-bit OS and/or are only running 1-2GB RAM. It still baffles me that people are using 32bit OSes these days.

The amount of memory in a system is physical memory, LAA/4GB tuning deals with virtual memory.

But yes, having less than 4 GB physical memory could cause serious slowdowns as virtual memory will have to be swapped between physical memory and hard disk.

For Skyrim, just enabling the LAA flag is not enough, because when you change the policy of windows memory manager to top-down, it will crash on the menu screen. This shows that there are at least some parts of Skyrim or it's 3rd party libs that cannot handle 32 bit addresses. Fortunately, this memory is allocated during start up, so with the default bottom-up memory allocation it is not a problem. But when you want to officially support it, this crash should not occur.

As a developper, I'd also want to know why the 4GB tuning is helping... since it is reducing crashes for people who are reporting that Skyrim never approaches 2GB of memory allocation for them. It could be memory fragmentation.

That makes sense, by Sheogorath, I think you're on to something.

This is a very likely scenario.

The official Bethesda 4GB LAA patch will be an update that all games will receive if connected to the internet, like all regular patches. However, the mod LAA patch is downloaded only based on the interest of the user; they'll only download it if they have the resources to take advantage of it (greater than 4GB of RAM). If anybody tries using the patch without having the required hardware, it will cause issues with the game. This is what Bethesda would encounter if they just released the patch and had it apply on all systems; widespread problems. By making it so that the patch identifies available resources and only functions if beneficial, it will not only be more desirable but also take longer to release.

As DCDeacon has said he won't be back in the office until next year I very much doubt the 4GB update will be out before 2012, I appreciate the need for testing I just wish they had done a bit more before releasing Skyrim, yes Oblivion had bugs but not as bad as this, I won't be pre-ordering the next Bethesda game no matter how much I love the Elder Scrolls games, I may well wait for GOTY next time.

Jeez, how many more threads do you guys wanna open on this topic?! It'll be out when it's out! Asking when it will be out by the hour is completely useless!

Yes, but version 1.3 is supposedly the same on all 3 systems. If bethesda put out a separate patch for every issue on the PC that the consoles don't have to worry about, we'd end up 20 versions ahead and the xbox kiddies would whine about not getting all the updates.

Well it's already confirmed we're getting the LAA patch soon, then the CK and Steam Workshop in January. I'm sure console users wouldn't mind PC users having PC orientated patches, just like I wouldn't mind the PS3 getting extra patches to fix stability or whatever.

We wouldn't mind because we know better. Console kiddies, on the other hand, tend to be rather ignorant.