Hello everyone. I have been reading the articles on the Skyrim 3.1 gb limit.Â
I have a decent system running:
intel i5 3570k quad @ 3.4ghz
2 x Geforce gtx 670 @ 4gb ea.
3 x Asus 27" Monitors
32 gb ddr3 sdram
Windows 7 pro. 64bit
Asus eK Quad X Motherboard
Etc. Etc. Etc.
I'm running a heavily modded Skyrim with A LOT of Texture mods. most of them between 2k and 4k graphics.Â
Haven't been one to use the S.T.E.P. program yet. (Looking to soon)
Ok now to the point, with the system I have, one would expect to not have any ctds due to performance but, I WAS. It was very frustrating.
Then one day a friend of mine made a simple suggestion to me that was almost too obvious.Â
Move the Skyrim client folder out of the 32 bit Program File (C:\Program Files (x86) folder just onto the operating system root drive ( ie. C:\Steam\Steamapps\common\Skyrim\TESV.exe)
(of course, because I have steam and play through the steam app, that meant un-installing the 50+ games and moving the whole thing.. took a few hours)
But once done, I haven't had anymore performance crashes since. and my monitors have told me at places I've hit just over 4.2 gb at times.Â
Also another thing to look at is that Windows (any version) has always only allowed a certain percentage of usable memory to be allocated to any one running executable at one time.Â
I'm not sure what the exact number is but it's roughly around 24% to 26% of your physical RAM. so if you are running 4gb ram then Skyrim will have issues around 1gb, 8gb around 1.5 - 2.2 gb,Â
16gb around 2.9 - 3.8 gb, 32gb around 7.4 - 9 gb.
having more RAM does raise the limit. but that also goes for any Program you run that may be cpu intensive ( depending also on your GPU).
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Running any program outside the C:\Program Files ((x86)) may also help a lot in the performance because you don't have Windows telling it how much RAM or VM it's allowed to have, to an extent.Â
I know this because I still have a working IBM 286 with Windows 3.1 on it and it does the exact same thing with the programs that were written for that era of processing power.
