Why ESO needs either a 64 bit client offered or a rollback to smaller system requirements

Rylana · June 2015

I begin this post with a couple of facts many of you may not know (and for the more tech savvy, may appreciate)

ESO is a 32 bit 2GB+ aware program. What this means is it is coded for 2 GB of memory addressing but with a certain flag turned on on an end users 32 bit machine (or any 64 bit machine by default) the system can map up to 4GB of memory in system ram. This is the hard limit and can never be exceeded, no matter how much RAM your machine has, 4GB is the absolute maximum ESO can ever address or use.

However, there is a problem inherent to this design. Remember a few months ago when they made ultra settings require a 2GB graphics card? They literally shot themselves in the foot and I will explain why.

Currently ESO uses approximately (the system ram, not the video ram)...

1.7 GB of RAM on low
1.9 GB of RAM on medium
2.1 GB of RAM on high
2.5 GB of RAM on Ultra

What you might not realize, is that the 4 GB limit mentioned above is INCLUSIVE of the video card addressing. What does this mean?

In most versions of Direct X, and other renderers, System ram literally holds a copy of what the VRAM is using while it renders. In essence, these files/processes are being run in two locations (actively in the GFX card, passively in the System RAM). There are also I/O conflicts in PCI/PCI-e busses that force the system to map/reserve addresses for those devices as well. All of the total useage must never exceed 4GB.

Ergo, if you approach Video ram useage above say 1.5 GB used (Ultra settings in high traffic) you are dangerously approaching the hard limit on 32 (36PAE) or 64 bit memory addressing in a 32 bit program.

Why is this?

Lets show you the math

Ram Max = 4GB
ultra settings = 2.5 Gb system ram
Video card = 1.5 GB utilization (with another 1.5GB being shadowed in system RAM that is "locked" from being addressed, essentially your system ram is ALREADY at 4GB utilization, you just dont see this)

We are at the hard cap, we cant go any higher than this. If at any moment the video card uses any of the last 500 megs of ram, we go over the 4GB limit and the client will freeze (or usually crash completely)

it gets worse in 32 bit OS, since most systems arent flagged with PAE (look it up if you want to experiment, but warning - you will never be able to use ultra settings on a 32 bit machine unless you know some kind of magic hax I do not)

Most 32 bit OS addresses up to 3GB of system ram, 3.25 is more exact, but for this exercise we will keep it at 3.

Lets say we are using low settings and a 1GB video card.

1.7GB System ram, 1GB video ram (with up to 1GB shadowed onto the system ram). We get a range of 2.7 (50% utilization)-3.7GB (100%utilization) potentially used (the higher the traffic on screen, the more useage you will see). At any point the combined useage (remember you have to double the VRAM as it is consumed) the 3GB threshold, the system will fault and crash, out of memory error.

Currently even on low settings (medium is worse) the client cannot function properly with even a 1GB video card installed (a 2GB video card would actually not even be compatible with ESO + an operating system, as even on a PAE enabled 32 bit machine, youd only have 2GB of addressable memory left, and about 800megs is used for Windows 7 as an example, the client itself uses 1.7 gigs at even the lowest possible settings, it crashes on launch usually)

This is why they need to reign in their memory useage, as even monster rigs with all the processing power in the world still have to obey memory addressing allocation regarding the client. We are exceeding industry specifications and hard limits. 32 bit OS is old, but still accounts for about 1/4th of all computers in the world. 64 bit cannot address enough memory to keep up with a horribly leaking/overfluffed game like ESO.

In a nutshell, Zenimax, you need to either...

A. Terminate support for 32 bit altogether and code a 64 bit client to be able to effectively handle the memory demands of this game
B. Revert a lot of your visual fluff changes, and make no further additions to memory useage. You need to get us back into the era where System RAM + Video ram was less than 4GB total to run this game at ultra, and optimally get it back to 3.25 (as that would also retain the 25% of your PC market that currently is suffering pretty hard if they havent left already).

As it is, I am falling into category B, as the most recent series of patches have put me into a position where my machine (being 32 bit with a 1GB GFX card) can no longer play the game for long, if at all, before memory allocation limits are exceeded and the client crashes. As you add more to the game without optimizing what is already there, more will suffer.

Just some realistic and legitimate feedback Matt Firor. Run this post by your engineers/programmers and see what they say.

@ZOS_MattFiror

Feel free to discuss, my friends.

Pman85 · June 2015

TL:DR
I have a nice alienware that pwns this game in 4k with no fps issues in Cyrodill ZvZ fighting, so i didnt read anything

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Trolling & Baiting]

Gandrhulf_Harbard · June 2015

You failed to mention that addressable RAM includes ALL RAM in the system, not just Video RAM.

So whatever RAM you have elsewhere at all affects that 4GB limit.

But your overall point is very, very, very valid.

But hey, why should game developers be competent in code optimisation when they can just blame the end-user's rig.

All The Best

Seafoam_hydra · June 2015

Edited/deleted

Paradox · June 2015

Can we talk about how the console versions are likely utilizing more RAM than PC?

Rylana · June 2015

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

You failed to mention that addressable RAM includes ALL RAM in the system, not just Video RAM.

So whatever RAM you have elsewhere at all affects that 4GB limit.

But your overall point is very, very, very valid.

But hey, why should game developers be competent in code optimisation when they can just blame the end-user's rig.

All The Best

I was trying to keep it relatively simple, but yeah, I added a bit about PCI reserving (I/O conflicts) that compounds the problem further, but even without including any of that, we are so close to hard limitations now, that I am actually surprised ANYONE is getting decent stability out of this game.

KerinKor · June 2015

Rylana wrote: »

Feel free to discuss, my friends.

I'm running on Ultra with a GTX970 4GB VRAM on one PC and with a GTX780 on another and see none of the problems you're describing, my clients never crash.

I see no issue here. I agree a 64-bit client would be nice but Im not having problems with the 32-bit one.

Also, suggesting ZOS will lose 25% of he players if those players have limited machines that can't run Ultra is, I would suggest, a tad hyperbolic.

Rylana · June 2015

KerinKor wrote: »

Rylana wrote: »

Feel free to discuss, my friends.

I'm running on Ultra with a GTX970 4GB VRAM one PC and with a GTX780 on another and see none of the problems you're describing, my client never crashes.

I see no issue here. I agree a 64-bit client would be nice but Im not having problems with the 32-bit one.

Also, suggesting ZOS will lose 25% of he players if those players have limited machines that can't run Ultra is, I would suggest, a tad hyperbolic.

On a 64 bit machine you are not yet reaching the hard limit, yet. If your video card (4GB vram) on ultra were to ever exceed 33% utilization (give or take) you may very well see issues actually.

Hyperbole is the incorrect word, I am using facts - if this game's design continues on the same trend, 25 percent (using the worldwide average of systems in the world, it is of course an estimation based on sample) of the people playing the PC version of this game will no longer be able to play it, on ultra or otherwise, the math simply doesnt work out. This game is very very resource intensive, and is overbloated for a 32 bit client base.

We are starting to hit the hard caps now on many configurations. Each patch increases us more, since ZOS seems to be hellbent on adding more memory useage to the game. Unfortunately, even your rig is not immune. You arent seeing it yet, because it hasnt hit that point yet. But if they dont stop now, it will.

JTorus · June 2015

It's buried somewhere (in the Mac Support section if I recall correctly) that the architecture for a 64 bit client exists, and while it will need some implementing is in the plans. Granted this is a forum response in the mac thread, but it would seem that they've got plans to release as much... soon.

Edit

Here
and here
and here too?

Merlin13KAGL · June 2015

Assuming a 64 bit OS (which would obviously be required for a 64 bit client), any PAE capable motherboard/bios should not suffer from this limitation, even with a 32 bit application.

Most motherboards on custom built rigs include this. If it's an off-the-shelf PC, you're probably not running with a high end video card in the first place, unless we're talking Alienware, etc.

The 32 bit client should still have the ~3.5 GB available, regardless of the onboard VRAM of the GPU, the entirety of which shouldn't be mapped one for one for direct access from the CPU, only the cache portion.

Simply put, they opted for 32 bit when Dev first started, and given their programming success thus far, I doubt they're keen on trying to port it over anytime soon. If anything, I'd see them reoptimizing the current client to use less memory in a given moment, and they'll only do that when they absolutely have no other choice.

EDIT: Short version, 1/4 of the remaining PC population or not, systems are designed with recommended system requirements in mind. After a certain point, it's not unreasonable to expect people to at least meet those recommendations if they wish to operate the software at even medium settings, let alone extreme ones.

If your system cannot handle it, you have the option to: Dial settings back, upgrade your system, or expect not to use the software.

If you're still running 32 bit anything, it's time. (When they do upgrade the client, the 32 bit legacy systems will be without support anyway.)

tplink3r1 · June 2015

"What you might not realize, is that the 4 GB limit mentioned above is INCLUSIVE of the video card addressing."]
I don't think so...
My VRAM alone goes up to 3,5gb with .ini tweaks.

Uberkull · June 2015

it gets worse in 32 bit OS, since most systems arent flagged with PAE (look it up if you want to experiment, but warning - you will never be able to use ultra settings on a 32 bit machine unless you know some kind of magic hax I do not)

It's not in the PAE, it's simply the LAA.

ESO is Large Address Aware. So for 32bit systems, you can enable this flag so it can use more then 2 GB of RAM.

If you have 4 GB of ram and are running a 32-bit version of Windows you can run the following command from an elevated command line:

bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa 3072

This allows 32-bit version of Windows OS to address 3 GB of RAM in LAA patched applications.

To disable this simply enter the following command from an elevated command prompt:

bcdedit /deletevalue IncreaseUserVa

Don't run this on 64bit Windows OS systems. It's not required.

This will greatly decrease the crash issues on 32 bit systems. And until ZOS decides to change the minimum requirements for running EOS, that's about all you can do on 32bit OSs.

keitoshi_ESO · July 2015

I have a big issue with the lack of 32-bit.

I have 32gb of RAM, 64-bit OS, and a 3gb GPU.

Plenty to run this, right?

Yet the game crashes within 5-30 minutes of play, exiting out with an "Out of Memory" error. I notice this ALWAYS happens when the .exe is using around 2.6gb.

I had this issue back in Beta. It vanished all through launch and beyond... until they dropped the subscription cost. It is now back in full force, and driving me utterly insane. I paid for this game. I love this game. Why can't I play it?!

Elsonso · July 2015

keitoshi_ESO wrote: »

I have a big issue with the lack of 32-bit.

I have 32gb of RAM, 64-bit OS, and a 3gb GPU.

Plenty to run this, right?

Yet the game crashes within 5-30 minutes of play, exiting out with an "Out of Memory" error. I notice this ALWAYS happens when the .exe is using around 2.6gb.

I had this issue back in Beta. It vanished all through launch and beyond... until they dropped the subscription cost. It is now back in full force, and driving me utterly insane. I paid for this game. I love this game. Why can't I play it?!

Windows, I assume? Just a note that 2.6 GB is not even close to out of memory on a 64-bit Windows operating system running a 32-bit application in your system configuration. Something more than ESO is causing you your headache.

DenMoria · July 2015

Since I only understood about 1/3rd of that post, I am eternally grateful that I'm on PS4 and don't even have to think about all of that.

I am sure that it was incredibly useful to anyone who isn't as much of a moron as I am.

Egonieser · July 2015

keitoshi_ESO wrote: »

I have a big issue with the lack of 32-bit.

I have 32gb of RAM, 64-bit OS, and a 3gb GPU.

Plenty to run this, right?

Yet the game crashes within 5-30 minutes of play, exiting out with an "Out of Memory" error. I notice this ALWAYS happens when the .exe is using around 2.6gb.

I had this issue back in Beta. It vanished all through launch and beyond... until they dropped the subscription cost. It is now back in full force, and driving me utterly insane. I paid for this game. I love this game. Why can't I play it?!

You are not alone, i have the same problem. It started at around 1.6 patch and lasted for a while then near 2.0 it was resolved, 2 patches ago it's back again. I thought it could be a windows 10 fault so i installed windows 7 as secondary OS and still getting the same crashes, usually only in Cyrodiil and after set periods of time. Not sure what to do anymore, tried every fix in the book to no avail. Only thing seems to help is when ZOS launches some patch that fixes it, then breaks it 2 updates later...

keitoshi_ESO · July 2015

lordrichter wrote: »

keitoshi_ESO wrote: »

I have a big issue with the lack of 32-bit.

I have 32gb of RAM, 64-bit OS, and a 3gb GPU.

Plenty to run this, right?

Yet the game crashes within 5-30 minutes of play, exiting out with an "Out of Memory" error. I notice this ALWAYS happens when the .exe is using around 2.6gb.

I had this issue back in Beta. It vanished all through launch and beyond... until they dropped the subscription cost. It is now back in full force, and driving me utterly insane. I paid for this game. I love this game. Why can't I play it?!

Windows, I assume? Just a note that 2.6 GB is not even close to out of memory on a 64-bit Windows operating system running a 32-bit application in your system configuration. Something more than ESO is causing you your headache.

Annoying that this is the ONLY game with that issue, and it happens on my wife's computer aswell. Yes, 64-bit Windows. I'm running Windows 8, she's running Windows 7.

Forestd16b14_ESO · July 2015

64 bit ? Why not N64 ?

ragespell · July 2015

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

You failed to mention that addressable RAM includes ALL RAM in the system, not just Video RAM.

So whatever RAM you have elsewhere at all affects that 4GB limit.

But your overall point is very, very, very valid.

But hey, why should game developers be competent in code optimisation when they can just blame the end-user's rig.

All The Best

Mmm, can we see something you have coded? Because, I'm sure you are at the same level of John Carmak, aren't you?

keitoshi_ESO · July 2015

ragespell wrote: »

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

You failed to mention that addressable RAM includes ALL RAM in the system, not just Video RAM.

So whatever RAM you have elsewhere at all affects that 4GB limit.

But your overall point is very, very, very valid.

But hey, why should game developers be competent in code optimisation when they can just blame the end-user's rig.

All The Best

Mmm, can we see something you have coded? Because, I'm sure you are at the same level of John Carmak, aren't you?

You sure aren't useful at all.

CaptainObvious · July 2015

~4GB per process on a decent 32-bit OS.

Attorneyatlawl · July 2015

@Rylana, this is incorrect. Not only can ESO address up to 4GB of memory on any modern machine (you'd be hard-pressed to find any system based on a 32-bit CPU even sold now, let alone in the past several years other than tablets), but on minimum settings it can run on hardware as low-end as a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet at ~25-30fps. Yes, it looks poor... but not at all when you take into account that's a 10 ounce Windows 8.1 tablet that costs about a hundred bucks and runs on battery for several hours doing so

with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. For anyone unfamiliar, that is a basic Bay Trail Atom tablet with four physical cores at low frequency, 2GB of DDR3 low-voltage memory, and a 32-bit CPU

. It can stream from my desktop using Steam In-Home Streaming (leveraging nVidia's "NVENC" encoder for the hardware, the same tech used for ShadowPlay which many probably know of) and play fluidly with at most 8-10ms of input latency added; in other words, practically none.

Video memory is not taken into account when determining system address space available for use by a 32-bit game client. That address space is handled by the video card drivers which are 64-bit .

I run a dual GTX 970 SLI system with a 4K native monitor + G-Sync. ESO often takes ~2-2.8gb of system memory with my fleet of addons installed, and can at times reach, separately, an additional 2.8-3.7gb of VRAM allocation on the GPU's when running at SET MIP_LOAD_SKIP_LEVELS "-3" in the usersettings.ini, which increases the visible texture resolution of the source files' data significantly (and increases VRAM usage as a result).

This is alongside maximum shadowing (Ultra, with HIGH_RES set to "0"), 1740 particle systems maximum, a 640MB LUA VM limit for the game's UI and addons (system memory is used for this), and every last bit of eye candy enabled (except the FXAA filter which degrades the image quality at this resolution and my viewing distance of around 22 inches from face-to-screen on a 28" monitor here at 4K as aliasing isn't helped yet textures are smoothed/blurred).

While your concern is well-meaning, it is technically inaccurate

.

KerinKor wrote: »

Rylana wrote: »

Feel free to discuss, my friends.

I'm running on Ultra with a GTX970 4GB VRAM on one PC and with a GTX780 on another and see none of the problems you're describing, my clients never crash.

I see no issue here. I agree a 64-bit client would be nice but Im not having problems with the 32-bit one.

Also, suggesting ZOS will lose 25% of he players if those players have limited machines that can't run Ultra is, I would suggest, a tad hyperbolic.

Indeed it is... I also have had zero crash issues except for a timespan that I had what turned out to be a defective RAM module (which was replaced under warranty), and an unstable overclock (one on the edge can cause random TDR's from the gpu drivers or eso client crashes, when playing) on my CPU or GPU's.

And it scales very, very well upwards, too... just as it does downwards like covered earlier in this post regarding running it on a basic windows 8.1 tablet. Here's a screenshot of the end of a pledge run recently

when I was dps-healing:

Click for full-size: http://i.imgur.com/Gmg1HCa.jpg

With my hardware, I rarely drop below 50 FPS anywhere, the lone exception being extremely massive open-field fights in Cyrodiil or extremely densely populated keep sieges where I hit as low as 40 sometimes. However, thanks to G-Sync, I keep zero extra input lag and don't get any tearing

. It's seriously amazing tech.