available video memory

[enkephalin07]

According to the runtime Profiler, I have 3745 available video memory, no matter what I configure in enblocal. If I set autodetect to true and vmem size to 0, it'll display 4096 for total video memory, which is playable and stable most of the time, but going by the suggested formula, I should have twice that.

 

If I set it to 8192 or lowball it to 7168, profiler will display those for total memory, but available memory remains at 3745, and the game runs a little less stable. From watching the performance in task manager, I can see TESV is never taking above that limit. I tried adjusting the reserved memory size, I tried disabling driver memory manager, but ENB still isn't allocating the memory to Skyrim.

 

Am I reading this wrong, or am I just not getting anything out of setting higher memory sizes? Is something restricting resource usage, and is there a workaround within or outside of ENB?

 

EDIT: Oh, specs. I'm running Win 8.1, 64-bit, with 8GB Ram and 2GB VRAM, AMD-Radeon dual graphics, with Crossfire set to default for this app.

Edited September 27, 2014 by enkephalin07

[phazer11]

I'd imagine that it's because you only have 8GB of RAM. I'll give a more detailed explanation later if one isn't provided.

[TechAngel85]

You're not looking at TESV.exe in task manager. Look for enbhost.exe which is ENBoost. There could be multiple even. However much enbhost.exe is using is how much extra the ENBoost feature is using.

[keithinhanoi]

Generally VideoMemorySizeMb should be used to tell ENB how much physical VRAM your video card has, in your case 2GB.

 

If you set it higher, then you are tell ENB it is allowed to use system RAM as if it is VRAM, for texture and polygonal (ie., meshes) caching, which is done by running instances of enbhost.exe.

 

So, simply monitoring TESV.exe will not reveal what system RAM which ENB is using as "extended" VRAM. TESV.exe is a 32-bit application, and can never use more than a total of 4GB of RAM, and about 900MB of that is reserved for "system" space (ie., dynamic loading libraries, or dlls) - so that's where you get the 3.1GB memory limit for Skyrim.

 

When you use the AutodetectVideoMemorySize setting in enblocal.ini, ENB does a check for how much memory seems to be available to use as extended VRAM, and assigns that. Unfortunately it is not 100% reliable, and may set a number higher than what is actually available.

 

In your case, figure you've got this going on in terms of system RAM allocation:

 

2GB - Windows 8.1

4GB - TESV.exe

 

So that leaves 2GB, more or less, available to use for one instance of enbhost.exe, if the VideoMemorySizeMb is set higher than 2GB.

 

If VideoMemorySizeMb is set to 4GB, then that's 2GB (physical VRAM) plus 2GB (system RAM.)

 

Anything higher than that would run the risk of forcing use of virtual memory - using your HDD / SSD as RAM, which is not ideal -or- ENB may just try to use more RAM than is available and Skyrim crashes.

 

Keep in mind that tesv.exe and enbhost.exe only use more RAM when it is actually needed. So you could theoretically set VideoMemorySizeMb higher than 4GB and things would be fine in game until you hit an area which requires a lot of caching of textures. Running out of available memory could also happen more quickly if you are generally using higher resolution texture replacements.

Edited September 28, 2014 by keithinhanoi

[enkephalin07]

If there's a more detailed explanation than "8GB RAM + 2GB VRAM - 2GB = 8GB" then it probably belongs in the guide.

 

I rarely see it TESV mem usage rise above 2GB, so it probably hasn't been needed and I shouldn't worry about it. But if this can use more memory, I'd like to try; I haven't put this system to a real stress test yet.

Edited September 28, 2014 by enkephalin07