Was there any smoke coming from your rig

Surprisingly it actually isn't that taxing on memory but yah if you raise the draw distances of objects & people to match it whew FPS down the toilet ...but yah stability goes right down the tubes even with distances of '1'. There's some limit that I'm hitting and the larger the ugrid setting the more rapidly you hit that. At 15 its stable wandering around for maybe up to 5 minutes and then CTD, at 13 I could go for maybe an hour before such a thing would hit. So I've abandoned that and just gone back to 11.

ED: Not to mention load times suffer brutally too, 30+ seconds or so if it doesn't just outright hang while trying.

Hi, some things to ponder....We are talking x64 only here. (x32 needs workarounds and not worth the Discussion, upgrade)

First. any EXE that has LAA enabled can ask the System for 4 GB Ram. Now if your Page file is turned off, all the System can give the EXE is Ram, (read Physical). IS this good or bad?

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/Skyrim/Skyrim19_hours32Mins.png as we can see in that pic, when Skyrim is pushed to extended periods (19:32 ) Thats hours...

37 Threads ........ starts with around 28-30
Page Faults........ 89,646,303.......... is it better to not have this ?
Private Mem........1.2
Page file..............2.2
Peak MEM ..........1.4

In total, it looks like Skyrim is addressing near 3.5 GB of RAM. Defiantly above 3. I have seen 1.9 - 2.3 used for Private MEM.

So is it better to not have the Page file? Gonna do a test.....

Also...is it better to use 8 Threads or just use as 4 physical Cores?

The real values are 1.2GB of ram used and 1.4GB was the most it ever used over your 19 hours of playing. That 2.2 virtual is just a value to tell you how much the program's virtual space has been allotted, not how much its actually using more like given you a rough idea of how big its world could be (but still allowed to grow larger). Either way, don't mess with swapspace, let win7 sort itself out, its rather good at that finally. Also let the chipset & CPU deal with the threads, they're also rather good at that now too.

This is with a mild amount of mods BEFORE the LAA and otherwise is vanilla aside from ugrids set to 7 and everything at ultra or slightly above ultra.

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/1387/totaladdressedmemorysky.jpg

I currently sit at about 2.7-3.1 GB of total ram usage after playing for awhile... but with usually skyrim hovering around 2.2-2.5

If you rely on system restore, leave the page file atleast 800mb, I set mine to 1024mb min and max.

Do you people use a lot of mods or something? Skyrim usually peaks at around 1300/1400mb of memory for me and sits around 1000mb most of the time, making the LAA patch more for stability than anything .

That seems to be the going concensus, and not just mods but specifically ones that sit in system memory more then video memory. That post earlier about the 1GB worth of meshes got me thinking and I started targeting mods with less emphasis on textures and indeed that's what brings the ram out to play for sure.

Nope...Crash at 3 hours..... things noticed without a page file.

Windows loads slower....Tried 3 times each one the Cursor went spinny circle <<(tech term) 3 or 4 times.
(normally 1-2 and 6-8 seconds faster)
Loading Game to Black screen. Smoke had Pauses, lag on mouse.<<(never have either)
Loading a save went...was able to read 2 FULL load screens. ( I never get to read a single one in full).
Game play, about the same, but all loads had pauses & stutters.

Already back to what win7 suggests for my rig.....12273

As the EXE crashed I cant get a screeny of what the stats were, http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/Nopagefilecrash_MEMend.png.

I dont get crashes as of yet, because I reinstalled the game again. However I do have about 3-4 GB of Texture/Mesh mods installed along with everything else.

Game under system properties maxes out at 1.75GB of memory used.
Battlefield 3 at this point uses more, however I don't have problems in that game. Just an example.

How the hell are people going over 2gb? Mine crashed when it peaked 1.9gb as explained in my first OP

There is ABSALUTELY no reason to experience instability or crashes at all with the page file disabled via the windows page file settings.. as this will only disable Hard Disk Paging and not physical ram being used as a virtual space PROVIDED that you don't exhaust your physical ram space which is highly unlikely and looking at those information you have there.... doesn't make any sense at all.

The only time disabling the hard drive page file resulting in instability with a modern OS and games/programs has ended up being due to a hardware instability or software side issue/bug/error of some type which may be specific to the program or the hardware/software setup per the users settings.

A default install of windows 7 x64 on a machine with 4gb or more of physical ram running 100% flawlessly stable followed by disabling of the page file within the windows OS .. AND NOT the virtual memory, has yet to produce an instability issue let alone lagging/stutters/etc. If anything it should REDUCE it, UNLESS there is an issue with the ram/memory controller/user settings.


Depending on What resolution you run Skyrim at and what Ugrids your using will dictate the amount of TOTAL addressed memory..... Physical + Virtual + Page + Physical Page + Swap + etc. by the specific program.

Followed by any additional MODS..

Running skyrim with vanilla defaults at 1080p nets me a typical MAXIMUM peak usage of everything at around 1.6-1.8gb of TOTAL Address memory used.

running the game at 3240x1920 results in that being bumped up by about 100-200MB resulting in CTDs without the LAA patch almost emediately or shortly after getting into the game.

Adding a ugrids of 7 bumps this up about 300-400MB max

adding 5.2 GB of High Resolution Textures increases this value by anywhere from 250mb in some places to 1500mb in others and sometimes if i'm not careful.... hitting the 4GB limits of skyrim's 32bit limitiation resulting in a Crash to desktop.

The fix is to break my game.. It is to make me use windowed mode all over again.. It is to make my game crash when it did not before.. Hard freezing when it did not before..

@DHjudas...All i know is I changed nothing else. Just the Page file...and got a crash at 3 hours..Changing back to what Win7 suggests (12 GB) and played 4 hours that same night. I will probably get a 6 hour session in tonight. I don't crash. I posted the 19 hour run!!

Love the game...its so immersive, cant wait for a couple mods....I need my..camping gear, Sailboat, sleep,Eat,Drink, ...mods and im good to go! Throw in a couple Overhauls,,Extra NPC's and animals...

Then we should see Skyrim constantly using 2.5 - 3.8 GB Ram just like my "FCOM ++250 mod Oblivion!"