I love the eye candy in Second Life. I want to see things the way they were meant to be seen. I monkey with debug settings to make things look better, and I love long draw distances. The downside to this is, it can eat up a lot of memory very quickly. I finally figured out what was happening when I was taking pictures in Avaria, with the draw distance set to 512M. Every 10-15 minutes, the viewer would crash. Watching the Task Manager, it became clear what was happening. When the SL viewer got to between 1.2 and 1.3GB of memory, bam, straight back to the desktop. Even a 256M draw distance at the Relay for Life pushed the viewer past this limit pretty quickly.
The problem is 32-bit memory addressing. 32-bit editions of Windows are limited to using 4GB of memory. About a gigabyte of that goes to memory mapped I/O and other flux capacitor stuff (actually much of that is the memory on your video card). 32-bit applications get 2GB to play with themselves. Why the SL viewer barfs up a lung well short of that, I don't know, but it does.
The solution is 64-bit Windows, a crapload of RAM and a 64-bit SL viewer. 64-bit flavors of XP, Vista and Windows 7 are available now. 8GB of DDR2 memory is available for well under a hundred dollars. The missing piece is the 64-bit viewer. There isn't one for Windows.
There is a hack, though. It's possible to make 32-bit applications "large address aware". This increases the amount of memory available to a 32-bit application to 3GB. The result of this hack is a viewer which is much harder to crash with long draw distances.
Details of the process can be found at Tom's Hardware Guide:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/64-bit-vista-gaming,2250-5.html
It doesn't make SL run faster, it just increases stability when you push the viewer past its current memory limits.
Of course, I have to say use it at your own risk. Microsoft dude quoted in the article warns of potential weirdness with /largeaddressaware hacked executables, but I've encountered none so far.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I'm so Laaazy!
Ah, six months! Epic fail! I'll try to get something useful posted before the year is over, I promise!
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