Fallout 4 General and Mod Discussion. It Just Works!

[DoubleYou]

That probably can be tweaked with some of the INI settings in Fallout.ini as well. For example, the settings below:

[General]
uiMemoryLevelBufferSize=10485760
uiMemoryLevelIdle=104857600
uiMemoryLevelIdleCritical=26214400
uiMemoryLevelLoading=419430400
uiMemoryLevelNumPasses=3

I will note that I alt-tabbed and found I was using over 12 gb of RAM (good thing I have 16 GB!).

[Cameron9428]

An interesting note and discovery by Boris:

Yikes, that's worrisome. I've been playing since release and haven't had any large dips in performance or crashes on my system (8gb ram). Hopefully it's not as bad as Boris makes it out to be...

[GrantSP]

If Fallout 4 needs more RAM than Witcher 3 to run I'll eat my hat, if I owned a hat that is!

[Guest]

Think that is a long stretch. I posted earlier somewhere in here, that we tested this on my friends old-ass PC with 4gb and it ran fine on medium at 1080p. Apparently it hovers around 2gb or something according to a video I recently watched. I think it was Potato Masher PC or something. The guy built a cheap PC last year with (edit) 4gb memory, but still it ran on high at 1080p locked 30fps, no dips. 60fps medium.

 

By the way, I need a update on the state of the modding from someone in the know. I'm seeing mods change that things with plugins right? What are they using? What about the niftool guys too? Any more news on a tool for that DX10+ compression ect ect?

 

Gameplay: Get yourselves to the Museum of Witchcraft. That is some freaky funk right there.

Edited November 15, 2015 by Guest

[ingus95]

I have 8 gb RAM and my game is running 60 fps stable on everything nearly maxed out

[TechAngel85]

Posting how much RAM you have doesn't really tell us anything. Include the RAM Windows is reporting the game is using. Also the current size of the swap file should be noted.

[Guest]

 

Here T. My bad it has 4gb of RAM not 8gb! The video has all the graphs and stuff.

Edited November 15, 2015 by Guest

[TechAngel85]

Within the first 2 mins of that video he says, "...as usual, if you have more RAM, then your system will use it". This is telling me the swap file is being used to store everything that RAM can't and things are getting swapped out far more often...meaning the hard drive is doing a lot more work. Exactly what Boris said. Since this guy didn't cover the swap file...we can't really know from that video yet. This might be be what was causing his "momentary frame drop" on the PC.

[Guest]

Within the first 2 mins of that video he says, "...as usual, if you have more RAM, then your system will use it". This is telling me the swap file is being used to store everything that RAM can't and things are getting swapped out far more often...meaning the hard drive is doing a lot more work. Exactly what Boris said. Since this guy didn't cover the swap file...we can't really know from that video yet. This might be be what was causing his "momentary frame drop" on the PC.

English please. 

[Greg]

English please. 

The video shows how much physical memory is being used, but it does not show how much virtual memory is being used on disk.

[DoubleYou]

One thing is certain: lots of RAM is good. Got an incredible deal on my 16 GB. Maybe this Black Friday will do the same.

[TechAngel85]

He said the game used up to 3.5GBs of RAM at one point and that doesn't include all of VRAM that was being used up as well. This means, the game is taking nearly all the system resources and only leave a few hundred MBs for the OS and other processes. A "swap file" or "page file" is "virtual RAM" that is created to hold files that would frequently be accessed by the game. This "virtual RAM" is actually just space on your hard drive. I'd expect that his swap file was at least 3GBs in size; as long as he wasn't limiting it to a smaller size.

 

To check how much RAM the game is using, you can simply check it's process in Task Manager and see how much "Memory" the process is using. This is measured in KBs so you'll have to convert that to GBs.

 

You can check a lot more in Resource Monitor. There you can check on just about everything the process is doing: CPU Usage, how many cores it's using, RAM usage, see what it's reading and writing from disk (swap file reads or loading new assets...constant high disk usage could indicate a lot of swap file use which is undesirable), and a ton of other things.

[Nebulous112]

Swap files, beyond being slower than using memory, are also bad news for SSDs. I believe the life of an SSD is basically determined by how many write operations are completed.

 

As far as I know, you can read files on an SSD almost infinitely without repercussions (i.e. opening an existing file); but writing is a different matter (i.e. making changes to a file, or creating a new file).

 

This is one of the reasons why one should never defragment an SSD...defragmentation is basically moving parts of files around so they are physically right next to each other on the disk platter. This requires an absolute ton of write operations to move things around.

 

(Think of a huge warehouse that is almost full, with no room to move. To sort all the items in the warehouse, you have to move each pallet many times to be able to get to the one you are aiming to move. Do that a bajillion times to sort the whole thing.)

 

The other main reason not to defragment an SSD is that it is fairly useless...it is not mechanical, so not much is really gained by files being physically next to each other. However, defragmentation does really speed things up on an HDD, because the mechanical parts have to move a lot less to read one file.

 

Traditional HDDs, while slower, are mechanical, and therefore simply die when a mechanical part quits working correctly.

 

Tl;dr - Swap files will reduce the life of your SSD significantly. Also, do not ever defragment an SSD.

Edited November 16, 2015 by Nebulous112

[Genius384]

I'm running on 16GB of RAM and haven't had any issues in 30 hours of gameplay thus far.  I've actually been quite impressed with the stability of the engine overall.

[Octopuss]

Swap files, beyond being slower than using memory, are also bad news for SSDs. I believe the life of an SSD is basically determined by how many write operations are completed.

 

As far as I know, you can read files on an SSD almost infinitely without repercussions (i.e. opening an existing file); but writing is a different matter (i.e. making changes to a file, or creating a new file).

 

This is one of the reasons why one should never defragment an SSD...defragmentation is basically moving parts of files around so they are physically right next to each other on the disk platter. This requires an absolute ton of write operations to move things around.

 

(Think of a huge warehouse that is almost full, with no room to move. To sort all the items in the warehouse, you have to move each pallet many times to be able to get to the one you are aiming to move. Do that a bajillion times to sort the whole thing.)

 

The other main reason not to defragment an SSD is that it is fairly useless...it is not mechanical, so not much is really gained by files being physically next to each other. However, defragmentation does really speed things up on an HDD, because the mechanical parts have to move a lot less to read one file.

 

Traditional HDDs, while slower, are mechanical, and therefore simply die when a mechanical part quits working correctly.

 

Tl;dr - Swap files will reduce the life of your SSD significantly. Also, do not ever defragment an SSD.

That's a myth that will probably still float around by the next decade. Almost any half decent SSD will likely last 10+ years when used normally.

Introduction: https://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment

And the result, 18 months later: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

 

Also, RAM is dirt cheap nowadays. I will probably upgrade to Skylake some time during the next year, and am really considering 32GB of DDR4 just because I can (but I'm already dragging my e-penis two metres behind me so....)

Edited November 16, 2015 by Octopuss