Recurring Crashes

Marques

Hello,

I have been experiencing daily crashes recently.
Every day I get at least one crash, sending me back to the desktop. The launcher remains open and working.

I'm using an iMac 5K with the latest version of OS X: 10.10.5.
Hardware is Intel Core i7 4790K, AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB and 24GB of RAM.

I can provide the crash report in private to anyone of the staff willing to assist.
My friend is playing under the same network with an older iMac model and hasn't been experiencing any crashes.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

chris.dillman

Hi Marques

We looked up most of your crash reports.
Looks like you are mostly just running out of RAM.

The only thing you can do before a 64bit client is to try playing the game at a lower screen resolution.
That should save a bunch of ram.

Try what ever res your friends playing at and see if things get better.

ESO was shipped before the 5K iMacs came out.

Sorry about this.
It is a know issue.

64bit client and new OpenGL renderer are slowly being worked on.

Marques

chris.dillman wrote: »

Hi Marques

We looked up most of your crash reports.
Looks like you are mostly just running out of RAM.

The only thing you can do before a 64bit client is to try playing the game at a lower screen resolution.
That should save a bunch of ram.

Try what ever res your friends playing at and see if things get better.

ESO was shipped before the 5K iMacs came out.

Sorry about this.
It is a know issue.

64bit client and new OpenGL renderer are slowly being worked on.

Hello Chris,

Thank you for the reply. Are you sure you checked the correct crash reports?
I ask this because RAM was never the issue, kindly check the values on the crash report:
mem.current = 2873
mem.peak = 2911
mem.physical = 24576

I'm not playing at 5K resolution or even near it; I'm using 2560 x 1440.
I have 24GB of RAM installed and usually play with most other applications off so it really can't be a RAM issue. I'm also following the issue with the system's Activity Monitor and there's plenty (a lot really) of free RAM when the crashes happen.

Maybe I'm missing something or there's another bug causing the crash?

Preyfar

Marques wrote: »

Thank you for the reply. Are you sure you checked the correct crash reports?
I ask this because RAM was never the issue, kindly check the values on the crash report:

By RAM, he may be referring to the graphics memory -vs- standard RAM.

Looking at Apple's site, the 5K Macs come default with a Radeon R9 M290 GPU which comes with 2GB of RAM (not sure if that's what you have, but just going by Apple's site). Generally, playing at 2550x1440 is generally recommended for GPUs with 4GB of RAM. 2GB can run it, but you start hitting some limitations -- especially if the OS is still running natively at 5K, but up-scaling the game from 2550x1440 to fit that resolution.

Marques

Preyfar wrote: »

Marques wrote: »

Thank you for the reply. Are you sure you checked the correct crash reports?
I ask this because RAM was never the issue, kindly check the values on the crash report:

By RAM, he may be referring to the graphics memory -vs- standard RAM.

Looking at Apple's site, the 5K Macs come default with a Radeon R9 M290 GPU which comes with 2GB of RAM (not sure if that's what you have, but just going by Apple's site). Generally, playing at 2550x1440 is generally recommended for GPUs with 4GB of RAM. 2GB can run it, but you start hitting some limitations -- especially if the OS is still running natively at 5K, but up-scaling the game from 2550x1440 to fit that resolution.

That's the default specification but I had my iMac built custom at Apple with an AMD Radeon R9 M295X that has 4GB of memory. Should be enough and the game actually plays very well except for this recurring crash.

KhajitFurTrader

Marques wrote: »

Thank you for the reply. Are you sure you checked the correct crash reports?
I ask this because RAM was never the issue, kindly check the values on the crash report:
mem.current = 2873
mem.peak = 2911
mem.physical = 24576

I'm not playing at 5K resolution or even near it; I'm using 2560 x 1440.
I have 24GB of RAM installed and usually play with most other applications off so it really can't be a RAM issue. I'm also following the issue with the system's Activity Monitor and there's plenty (a lot really) of free RAM when the crashes happen.

Maybe I'm missing something or there's another bug causing the crash?

With ESO being a 32-bit process, the maximum size of its address space (= virtual RAM) is 4 GB (2^32 bytes). But not all of this is freely available as heap memory (i.e. usable for data that is needed by the program). Due to the nature of how the OS divides user and system privileges ("spaces"), and how it shields processes from one another, some parts of that memory are used by mapped-in system libraries (e.g. libc, I/O Kit etc.), and other parts are used by dynamically loaded user-space libraries (e.g. OpenGL etc.). Then there is the program code itself, like the rendering engine, that takes up some space. All memory that is left of those 4 GB is available to the process to be dynamically allocated and released, and will be used for graphical assets like textures. With quality on high, they'll make up the bulk of heap memory usage.

The maximum heap size of ESO has always been around 2.7 to 2.9 GB. Any attempt to allocate more memory than there is available to the process at the time of allocation leads to an exception; this is handled by the ZOS CrashReporter or, failing that, by the OS itself. As a conclusion of the above, choosing a lower texture quality or lower resolution will also lower the probability of such an exception to occur, and/or significantly lengthen the amount of time between occurrences. That being said, there used to be times when ESO was crashing reliably about every 15 minutes, during the beta. It has come a very long way since then.

Btw, ESO as a 64-bit process won't probably use a much bigger heap space than it does now, even if all of the machine's physical RAM is addressable by such a process, and then some. Allocation of more memory than what is actually needed at any given time is simply bad programming style, and would lead to severe, overall performance problems of the machine. But out-of-memory exceptions will be a thing of the past, then.

chris.dillman

Hi

The issue is not about the amount of RAM in the machine or the amount of VRAM in on the GPU.

The problem is ESO is a 32bit app and can only use around 3.5GB ram for storing data and talking to hardware and the OS.
The OS etc leaves ESO with maybe 2.5 GB to use.

mem.current = 2873
mem.peak = 2911
mem.physical = 24576

This shows that the ESO client is peaking at 2900.
We would like to see 2500 OR less on most of the version of OS X out there.
Especially on 10.10 where the OS was using up more ram then past versions in 32bit processes.

We expect ESO to crash when using over 2500 mb.

Our theory is that in this case the 5K iMac is making REALLY big screen buffers.
and ESO makes a lot of them probably or more at the current screen resolution.
Well 1/2 when not in retina mode.

We suggest you try running at the same settings your friend is using and see if the game is more stable.

When ESO finally moves to a 64bit client it will be able to talk to more RAM.

We don't have a timeline on when that will be ready.

Marques

chris.dillman wrote: »

Hi

The issue is not about the amount of RAM in the machine or the amount of VRAM in on the GPU.

The problem is ESO is a 32bit app and can only use around 3.5GB ram for storing data and talking to hardware and the OS.
The OS etc leaves ESO with maybe 2.5 GB to use.

mem.current = 2873
mem.peak = 2911
mem.physical = 24576

This shows that the ESO client is peaking at 2900.
We would like to see 2500 OR less on most of the version of OS X out there.
Especially on 10.10 where the OS was using up more ram then past versions in 32bit processes.

We expect ESO to crash when using over 2500 mb.

Our theory is that in this case the 5K iMac is making REALLY big screen buffers.
and ESO makes a lot of them probably or more at the current screen resolution.
Well 1/2 when not in retina mode.

We suggest you try running at the same settings your friend is using and see if the game is more stable.

When ESO finally moves to a 64bit client it will be able to talk to more RAM.

We don't have a timeline on when that will be ready.

Thank you for the long explanation Chris. Much appreciated.

The problem with a lower resolution is that makes the game appear blurry on these machines, probably due to downscaling.

Not asking for a date or anything definitive, but is it possible that we see a 64bit client in 2015 or something more towards 2016?

Prizax

"The problem is ESO is a 32bit app and can only use around 3.5GB ram for storing data and talking to hardware and the OS."

Well this is kinda lame you guys really need to change this if you want your game to still be played in the future...