Horatio (such a wonderful name  ) if you were to G....le the phrase large address aware you would find a thread on TechPowerUp which, although long, is rather illuminating.  Therein (p.1) is a link to download a small utility which, if used, will make any 32bit application/game/program etc. large address aware.  It can also be simply reversed.

 

I commend the thread to you.

You just back-up your FS exe and then run the patch..... Then you can just reinstate the backup if you decide that 2gigs is better than 4gigs

 

Hey John......sorry, I wasn't meaning to try and call you out

And yes my analogy did have some rather large holes in it :-)

How about, my old car only had 4gears and my new has 5gears......and the old one worked just fine.......so why would I use that 5th gear?

Cheers

Romflyer

Anyone actually see how much memory FS9 really uses?

Anyone actually see how much memory FS9 really uses?

On a reasonably bog standard FS9.1 install (REX 512x512 Clouds and "Australia" Sky theme and Zinnertek Ultimate Water Advanced), flying the default C172 in and around the New Zealand Southern Alps, 534.5Mb.

 

Dorian

On a reasonably bog standard FS9.1 install, flying the default C172 over the New Zealand Southern Alps, 534.5Mb.

 

Dorian

Nice! Nowhere near 2GB. Any other data?

This is a very fresh (only yesterday) re-install of FS9.1; no other addon sceneries except NZ 20m Mesh, NZ Topo and NZ LandClass (all by Christian Stock) and Ray Smith's NZCH AFCAD. Using Project BlueSphere environmental textures, Rex Overdrive for clouds and sky color and Zinnertek water. All default FS9 aerial airport sceneries (Amsterdam, Sydney, Seattle, yada, yada, yada) have been disabled in the scenery.cfg as well as all Regions with the exception of Oceania (where I do 99.9% of my flying). All sliders are to the right (with the excpetion of Mesh Resolution which is set at 90) and even have ground scenery shadows On.

 

Did notice that dialing up the cumulus cloud coverage to 5/8ths upped VAS usage from 534.5 to 590Mb.

 

So, with the .exe 4Gb patched, I have approximately 3.4Gb VAS to play with. Considering the most complex a/c I have in my hanger is the MAAM sim DC3, shouldn't be experiencing OOMs very soon

 

Dorian   

The patch installer automatically backs up fs9.exe.

 

 

Did notice that dialing up the cumulus cloud coverage to 5/8ths upped VAS usage from 534.5 to 590Mb.

 

So another user nowhere near 2GB used.

 

Anyone with a large number of internal add-ons?

The 4GB patch installer automatically backs up fs9.exe.

Jim,

 

On a system will a large number of complex add-ons with high res mesh and GEPro I've seen near 1.8Gb in use on XP.  Win7 will let you have more because of the way the drivers and OS get loaded, but not much more on a 32 bit system.  64 bits will let you have nearly all of the 2Gb allocated.

 

DJ

Thanks DJ,

 

Confirmed what many already knew....the 4GB patch is a waste, may cause more harm than good, and serves no purpose for FS9 because you are rarely, if ever, going to even get near the 2GB limit no matter what.

Jim,

 

It depends really... I got in to it in FS9 on Win XP because (probably) of a mix of add-ons and poorly designed scenery that in conjunction with a (gasp!) 1GB graphics card and XP's poor memory management (compared to Vista, 7, and later) resulted in blurry terrain and bad performance.  I probably pushed FS9 about as far as it can be pushed in that environment.  The drawback (and there always is one) is that the OS had issues with certain other software as a result of the OS changes needed in a 32 bit OS to really use the 'large address aware' functionality.  In Win7 x64 it becomes a whole new ballgame and I have yet to push the patched FS9 to the wall with any combination of add-ons.

 

Since the patch simply changes one bit in the executable and no OS changes are required, it is a free lunch in the Win7 x64 environment and can't and doesn't cause any problems.  Realize too that FSX SP2 or Acceleration patches the FSX executable in the same way because of that apps extreme (possibly) memory demands.

 

It isn't fair however to say that the patch causes more harm than good in any OS other than a 32 bit pre Win7 OS and those are becoming rare.  All the patch does is tell the loader to allocate a larger block size for the virtual address table...

 

Regards,

DJ

 

 

going to even get near the 2GB limit no matter what.

 

-1

 

 

It depends really...

 

+1

I can only second DJ (ubersu). With FS2004 operating with demanding add-ons (scenery, AI, wheather) and never stopping to install new ones I reached the point when I got an OOM warning nearly every second flight. For instance at a flight EDDF - OMDB I was never be able to land, because VAS went into the range of 1.8 - 2 GByte and if I saw the Burj el Khalifa already on the horizon - OOM. However, having a WinXP 32bit OS that time I wasn't able to benefit from the patch, because the changes necessary to make for WinXP made the OS nearly unusable. The only thing that helped was to "downgrade" my FS2004 again by deinstall some add-ons and particularly by decreasing the entries in scenery.cfg

 

Now in a Win/ 64 bit environment that doesn't need changes to the OS itself, I have patched FS9.exe again. I meanwhile reached the former amount of sceneries by far but I never had an OOM again.

 

And generally, I never realized any negative effect of the patch under Win7.

 

However, if you have no problems with OOMs and your FS2004 runs stable it's up to you. Backup your FS9.exe, and if you experience any negative effect, delete the patched one and return to the old one.

However, having a WinXP 32bit OS that time I wasn't able to benefit from the patch, because the changes necessary to make for WinXP made the OS nearly unusable. 

 

Same experience here ..... although I never really did have many problems with OOM problems .... has been really quite stable.

I do frequent full-system backups "just in case".  I have added a few things which caused some "heartburn".  Reinstalling the backup "solved" my bad luck and/or "stupidity".