kkunderwood

I don't suppose the possibility of it being a .NET issue would open up new avenues for possible fixes as well?This is not a .NET issue! C++ depends upon explicit release of resources which would result in memory leaks if you didn't play by the rules. Java and .NET use garbage collection which will eventually recover resources, but asynchronously on a separate thread from the program. If Skyrim is quickly adding resources such as HD graphics before the garbage collector gets around to releasing deallocated resources, Skyrim can run out of memory.

I am a retired software engineer with over 40 years of experience. Until I stumbled onto this thread from a post on the Nexus, I had wondered about these CTDs. I have been running the Skyrim Performance Monitor for a week now and had two CTDs, one at 3.067GB of RAM and the other at 3.104GB. However, I have noticed that there would be sudden unexpected drops in the amount of allocated RAM for no apparent reason that leads me to believe that this a memory garbage collection issue. As a test I saved when I had at least 2.5GB of RAM then reloaded the save and found that substantially less RAM was being allocated on the order of 600MB. Since .NET is being used in Skyrim, memory will be released whenever the garbage collector decides to do so. This is not a good approach for a real-time game like Skyrim especially since .NET provides the capability to dispose of allocated resources under program control instead of at the whim of the garbage collector. I am running on an MSi GT780DXR gaming laptop with an NVIDIA GTX570M GPU. This hardware has 16GB of RAM, so I locked the system and driver software in memory and disabled paging. I also replaced the two 750GB HDD running raid-0 with two 1TB hydrid SSHD running raid-1. The GPU typically runs at 100% while the CPU coasts at less than 50%.Â