Mass Effect for PC is so well optimized it blows my mind.

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

As to vista I'm using it on 1.25 gb on a 4 year old computer and it runs fine

Woah! Details please, I find that incredibly hard to believe. Do you have some settings that take off practically all that unneeded software and "pretty graphics"? - or did you just double boot XP and Vista and are using XP but telling everyone you have vista >_>

 

[Elim Garak]

It's not 32 bit processors that have a limit on memory, it's 32 bit operating systems. XP 32 and Vista 32 both have a 3.3 gig 'ceiling' for RAM, I gather it has something to do with memory addressing or some such esoteric concern.

A 64 bit OS will happily use 4 gig of RAM, and beyond.

The annoying thing is that MicroSoft know how to make a 32 bit OS utilise more than 3 gig of RAM, they have a work around that they used in various server based versions of Windows, they just didn't bother for XP and Vista.

OK, read this - this is why 32-bit Windows will use only about 3.3 GB of memory:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_64

And yes, you could use the server trick (hack) to address more memory than that on x86 Windows builds - at the cost of severe performance hits. Plus the software must be able to address that memory as well.

 

[JakubK666]

As to vista I'm using it on 1.25 gb on a 4 year old computer and it runs fine

Woah! Details please, I find that incredibly hard to believe. Do you have some settings that take off practically all that unneeded software and "pretty graphics"? - or did you just double boot XP and Vista and are using XP but telling everyone you have vista >_>

I was running Vista on my "old" High-end £1000 computer from......2001.JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT!

1,5ghz Single Core Pentium 4
768mb RAM (512mb upgrade from 256mb)
Radeon 9600 256mb AGP(Upgraded from GeForce 2 MX400

Mind the 5 minute boot,it was running quite well.

BTW ElArab, were you running these games of Steam? I have the same processor as you(2.8 Pentium D) and after turning static lightning on, in STALKER, I can 30fps it on Very High 1280x1024.
Steam explains everything though.Nothing like spending 2 minutes waiting for Steam to extract the GCF's.If you ever have the choice, go for the discs and standard install.

 

[Alex_P]

It's not 32 bit processors that have a limit on memory, it's 32 bit operating systems. XP 32 and Vista 32 both have a 3.3 gig 'ceiling' for RAM, I gather it has something to do with memory addressing or some such esoteric concern.

A 64 bit OS will happily use 4 gig of RAM, and beyond.

The annoying thing is that MicroSoft know how to make a 32 bit OS utilise more than 3 gig of RAM, they have a work around that they used in various server based versions of Windows, they just didn't bother for XP and Vista.

Both your operating system and your CPU impose limits on your capabilities.

A 32-bit processor actually does limit you to 4 gigs of byte-addressable memory.

It's fairly straightforward:
Size of memory register = 32 bits.
Number of things you can count using 32 binary digits = 2^32.
Size of each thing you're counting = 1 byte (hence "byte-addressable").
(Number of things you can count using 32 binary digits) * (size of each thing you're counting) = 2^32 bytes = 4 GB.

What some versions of Win2k3 Server let you do is address memory in units larger than bytes, using a special feature of the hardware called PAE [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension]. Info here [http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx].

Since you're trying to play a game rather than run 1000 instances of a web service, though, you wouldn't actually benefit from this trick. That's because you're still limited (once again by that 32-bit memory register) to only 4 GB of virtual memory per process.

Hell, even that 4 GB of RAM can't all be used by your game because Windows, like Linux, splits each process' address space into "system-level" and "user-level" space, in order to give the application access to the system (by default, you get 2 GB of user-level virtual address space per process; you can set a flag somewhere to make it 3 GB instead).


In conclusion: unless it's running on a 64-bit system and specifically compiled for it, your Windows game is never going to be able to load more than 3 GB of its own resources into RAM anyway. (Your OS is still quite capable of using the full 4 GB of physical RAM for stuff, though -- just not all part of one process.)

-- Alex


EDIT: Woops! Good catch by Garak here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

Some of the stuff your procesor is addressing with it's 4 byte-addressable GB isn't RAM.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Eh, Half and Half - I got STALKER: SoC through steam - I had occassional crashes at first but then the game updated and it was fine.

 

[JakubK666]

Enough of the 4gb bitching already. Just buy a goddamn 8GB Solid-state Drive,split it into two partitions and have an extra 4gb+4gb of super-fast RAM-like virtual memory.

 

[Nugoo]

Enough of the 4gb bitching already. Just buy a goddamn 8GB Solid-state Drive,split it into two partitions and have an extra 4gb+4gb of super-fast virtual memory.

SSD's aren't even close to RAM in terms of speed, not to mention they're ridiculously expensive.

 

[JakubK666]

Enough of the 4gb bitching already. Just buy a goddamn 8GB Solid-state Drive,split it into two partitions and have an extra 4gb+4gb of super-fast virtual memory.

SSD's aren't even close to RAM in terms of speed, not to mention they're ridiculously expensive.

Fair enough but discussing a proven fact of missing RAM over again ain't gonna change anything

 

[shatnershaman]

As to vista I'm using it on 1.25 gb on a 4 year old computer and it runs fine

Woah! Details please, I find that incredibly hard to believe. Do you have some settings that take off practically all that unneeded software and "pretty graphics"? - or did you just double boot XP and Vista and are using XP but telling everyone you have vista >_>

Um 2.66 ghz pentium 4 1.25 gb 400 mhz RAM 70GB 5400 RPM Hard drive NVIDIA 256MB 6200

I'm running vista premium with aero on no duel boot shit I hate xp

 

[Pulsifer]

Just throwing my two cents inn, here, but I think the install helps a lot. Allows the computer to access the information and cache it a lot better, which should decrease load times a lot. And the 360 game was already really well optimized, so I guess they just made it that much better.