Is everyone aware of this Vista SNAFU?

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This thread (and article) reminds me of the old days when people complained loudly that games were becoming too taxing and demanding on systems, and that developers need to tone down a bit so everyone can play.

I've always thought this to be selfish towards the people who wants technology to advance. I have a powerful rig, and I want the games to look its best and the AI and environment to be near perfect. I'm tried of pixelated games and scripted AI. I have a 64bit operating system. I want software to begin migrating to 64bit environments.

Eventually everyone shut up and upgraded their computers and realized that the whole world isn't going to stagnate and wait for them.

So what if majority of the people still buy Vista32 when they have 64bit hardwares. Thats not the developer's problem. I say keep making taxing games. Sooner or later the consumers will switch over when they are forced to. Consumers don't like changes. They never have. But when forced, they will.
 
From the Tim Sweeney interview on evga.com:
Q. Does Unreal Tournament 3 take advantage of over 512MB of video memory?

A. We’re going to significant lengths to take advantage of 512MB video cards and PCs with lots of memory. On PC, we’re shipping lots of 2048x2048 textures, a higher resolution than we can support pervasively on console platforms. However, PCs running 32-bit Windows XP or Vista run up against a glass ceiling pretty quickly above 512MB of video memory. Because of the way the OS maps video memory into the 32- bit address space, going beyond 512MB doesn’t really increase the overall usable memory. Thus, we’re not focusing on exploiting more than 512MB video cards.

That situation will change over the next few years as Windows Vista 64-bit adoption takes off, because the 64-bit OS eliminates the address space bottlenecks and enables video cards to scale way up in usable video memory. But, if you look at the latest data on what gamers are actually using, e.g. with Valve’s excellent survey of gamer hardware ( http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html), it’s clear that 64-bit Vista isn’t taking off yet. Give the industry a couple years, and this will change.
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http://www.evga.com/gaming/gaming_news/gn_100.asp
 
jimmyb said:
No. If the program is compiled to use 32 bit addresses it cannot take advantage of the increased address space.
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you can, it just requires a hack.
MadBoris wrote a hack to fix it for SupCom. Works great.

has something to do with enabling large address space in the .exe header.
kinda simple actually. I dont know if this fix works for *any* app though. Depends on the memory management techniques the developers use.
 
Monkey God said:
you can, it just requires a hack.
MadBoris wrote a hack to fix it for SupCom. Works great.

has something to do with enabling large address space in the .exe header.
kinda simple actually. I dont know if this fix works for *any* app though. Depends on the memory management techniques the developers use.
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It works marginally and it doesn't enable greater than 32bit addressing. It enables extension beyond 2GB user space if the OS is setup to support it (and that is a dubious change to make on 32 bit OS's). Even on 64bit OS you are still limited to 4GB max for 32bit applications, nothing changes this except the developer building a 64 bit version of the application.
 
Snowdog said:
It works marginally and it doesn't enable greater than 32bit addressing. It enables extension beyond 2GB user space if the OS is setup to support it (and that is a dubious change to make on 32 bit OS's). Even on 64bit OS you are still limited to 4GB max for 32bit applications, nothing changes this except the developer building a 64 bit version of the application.
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Well, if you define marginally as "now it doesn't crash" versus "it crashed all the time on big maps" I would agree with you.
 
Monkey God said:
Well, if you define marginally as "now it doesn't crash" versus "it crashed all the time on big maps" I would agree with you.
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Jimmy said it didn't allow greater than 32bit addressing, you answered: "yes it does with a hack". Jimmy is correct. Nothing allows greater than 32bit addressing for 32 bit apps.

If you read both Anand articles even when they did all the tricks in the book, they still crashed it under Vista. So it crashes less, not never, in fact in now crashes about as much as untouched XP.

Vista 64 gets you a bit further. Here is a table using a 8800 GTX/32bit apps. Using worse case numbers (company of Heros) to demo the scale of the problem.

Default User space (32bit apps).
XP: 2GB
Vista: 2GB
V64: 2GB
Note: same user space for all.


Effective (after potential Vram losses) Approx.
XP: 2GB
Vista: 1GB
V64: 1GB
Note: untweaked and not large address awareness, XP is better than even Vista 64.

Effective (after Vram losses and 3GT/large address tweaks) User space (32bit apps). Approx.
XP: 3GB
Vista: 2GB
V64: 3GB (but most stable of three tweaked setups).
Note: Once they are tweaked Vista 32 is drastically behind and only catching up with untweaked XP.

There is a video Ram bug (or bad feature) that chews memory in Vista, if you are running 32 bit apps; XP is generally a good bet at this time. If they fix the vista bug, then Vista 32 will be in the same ballpark as XP, and Vista64 will be clearly better than both.
 
Snowdog said:
...
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SupCom crashes on vista quite often just because. I trust the guys over @ gpgnet who use/play it every day then AT who just ran a single test session.

In 32bit XP, enabling large addressing stops the only source of app crashing for a large number of people.

Thats all I am saying.
Im not going to get into a huge internet debate over this with you. The point is, it CAN be hacked, for certain situations.
 
Monkey God said:
SupCom crashes on vista quite often just because. I trust the guys over @ gpgnet who use/play it every day then AT who just ran a single test session.
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That's good to know, as I was planning on loading this game on my Vista 64 system soon.
 
Monkey God said:
SupCom crashes on vista quite often just because. I trust the guys over @ gpgnet who use/play it every day then AT who just ran a single test session.

In 32bit XP, enabling large addressing stops the only source of app crashing for a large number of people.
Click to expand...

That is no different than what the guys at Anand said. After they enabled large addressing the could not get it to crash on XP. So many reading comprehension problems here.

The big news from their testing was that it would still crash in Vista, even with large addressing enabled, because there is apparently a bug in Vista that chews up extra memory address space to support VRAM.

Is there also a numeracy problems that stop people from seeing the obvious? Memory usage in company of Heros:


Windows XP: 1.3 GB
Windows Vista: 2.2 GB


In case your obvious meter is broken: 1.3GB address usage good. 2.2GB address usage bad...

This is not a sup comm only issue, it can effect other titles as well, There is a Vista bug/bad feature implementation that needs to be addressed.
 
you do realize also that Vista uses up more memory due to pre-fetch etc etc

btw 2GB is not the 32bit limit, 4GB is, there is an easy way in vista x64 anyways to enable programs to use more then 2GB, its something easy someone showed me and I'll try to find it
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
you do realize also that Vista uses up more memory due to pre-fetch etc etc
Click to expand...

You do realize that the amount of difference was equivalent to the VRAM in the video card and changed to match each video card that was used with different amounts of VRAM, and that this wasted address space lead to earlier crashes. Nothing to do with pre-fetch etc, etc,...
 
Snowdog said:
You do realize that the amount of difference was equivalent to the VRAM in the video card and changed to match each video card that was used with different amounts of VRAM, and that this wasted address space lead to earlier crashes. Nothing to do with pre-fetch etc, etc,...
Click to expand...

You do realize that logic escapes people when they are emotionally attached to their side of the argument.

It's really obvious that very few people bothered to RTFA. Of those that did, looks like a lot of them decided what it was about before they read it, and are seeing some bias that doesn't exist.

Really, you're pissing in the wind. Now I remember why I decided to stay out of this forum. It reminds me of the lunch room in high school, and makes me want to choke the stupid out of people.
 
Azhar said:
This thread (and article) reminds me of the old days when people complained loudly that games were becoming too taxing and demanding on systems, and that developers need to tone down a bit so everyone can play.

I've always thought this to be selfish towards the people who wants technology to advance. I have a powerful rig, and I want the games to look its best and the AI and environment to be near perfect. I'm tried of pixelated games and scripted AI. I have a 64bit operating system. I want software to begin migrating to 64bit environments.

Eventually everyone shut up and upgraded their computers and realized that the whole world isn't going to stagnate and wait for them.

So what if majority of the people still buy Vista32 when they have 64bit hardwares. Thats not the developer's problem. I say keep making taxing games. Sooner or later the consumers will switch over when they are forced to. Consumers don't like changes. They never have. But when forced, they will.
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heh heh....

Yeah, only this time it's somebody rabidly seeking to "prove" an OS problem which is holding them back, rather than facing the fact that they're trying to do too much on too little machine, and facing the fact that using extended application address space is NOT a facility which was ever intended for games and chunky graphics cards!


Snowdog, can you seriously not see the illiness of what you're doing here? Are you that intent on 'proving' some imagined inadequacy of the new OS version that it blinds you to commonsense? The hurling of insults at people, accusing them of literacy and numeracy problems, is a poor way to argue what is, after all, a poor argument. 'Fixing' the OS isn't the way to confront this scenario, after all! Extending the application address space under either 32-bit Windows version is a piss-poor way to confront the problem!


Get a couple of things straight, rather than rabidly pursuing this course of trying to portray this as some general inadequacy of Vista:

  • If you are running an application which, in itself, requires more than 2Gb of addressable memory then running it on a rig which only has 2Gb of physical memory is silly.
  • If you are running a memory hungry game on a rig with more than 2Gb of physical memory, and its application address needs create concern about the 2Gb application barrier then running it under a 32-bit OS version is silly. The 64-bit implementation (which is freely provided with Vista) is the one to use.
  • Tweaking the application address limit is NOT a move suited to games.
  • 64-bit Vista is NOT (as Anandtech implies) a prohibitively difficult transition.

If somebody is pushing the envelope by exceeding sensible pratice, and 32-bit Vista chucks a hissy-fit about it sooner than 32-bit XP does, then that's no drama and it's also something which should be expected. Vista introduces another level of protection for applications. The answer to that is to not be so silly as to push the boundaries of sensible practice! As already said by a number of people in the thread, install and use the 64-bit OS installation instead.

Instead, you are hell-bent on positing a scenario in which a user with very little commonsense tries to do too much on too little machine, and then claiming the situation as evidence of some imagined shot-coming in vista just because Vista spits the dummy at the silliness a bit more readily.

And why?

When it all boils down, it's all on the basis of something you've read. You've gone to Anandtech and found an article where a writer, who needs to fill up page space, has waffled on about this ridiculous scenario. Admittedly, the writer has acknowledged that the scenario only arises when developers and users are doing things which they shouldn't be doing, but he goes on to waffle on about what happens when it's done anyway!

And why is this all evidence that Vista has a 'serious bug/flaw'? Ih yes! That's right! That writer found somebody from Nvidia who, when confronted with this ridiculous scenario, engaged in an exercise in blame-shifting by suggesting that "Microsoft is working on it", rather than by simply pointing out that such demanding tasks shouldn't be run on such a restricted rig to start with!


jimmyb rightly pointed out, earlier in the thread, that the investigation is an interesting one in itself, in an academic sense. But that's all it is. Academic!

The fact remains that when the end-user is pushing the boundaries of tolerance for rigs with 2Gb of system memory and with a 32-bit OS installed, the only sensible response is to add more system memory and/or make the move to the 64-bit platform. Comparisons which show different levels of tolerance from one Windows version to another make absolutely no difference to that reality, and when the end-user decides to ignore common sense and continue following poor practice then the "problem" is the end-user, not the OS!
 
Catweazle said:
The fact remains that when the end-user is pushing the boundaries of tolerance for rigs with 2Gb of system memory and with a 32-bit OS installed, the only sensible response is to add more system memory and/or make the move to the 64-bit platform. Comparisons which show different levels of tolerance from one Windows version to another make absolutely no difference to that reality, and when the end-user decides to ignore common sense and continue following poor practice then the "problem" is the end-user, not the OS!
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Except for when the previous version of the OS handles the 'problem' better than the shiny new flagship OS. Then the problem is with the new version of the OS, since the old one managed the boundary pushing just fine.

Or did you miss that part of the article?
 
nigerian_businessman said:
You do realize that logic escapes people when they are emotionally attached to their side of the argument.

It's really obvious that very few people bothered to RTFA. Of those that did, looks like a lot of them decided what it was about before they read it, and are seeing some bias that doesn't exist.

Really, you're pissing in the wind. Now I remember why I decided to stay out of this forum. It reminds me of the lunch room in high school, and makes me want to choke the stupid out of people.
Click to expand...

FYI, I did read the article and FYI I have 4 machines, 1 running Vista X64, 3 running XP PRO/MC varients. My vista machine REGARDLESS of Vcard memory uses 1.2GB of ram, running msn messenger and firefox. my XP machine uses less then 500mb doing the same thing, I have had a 256m,512m, 640m, 768m video card in the vista machine, and all 3 have used the same amount of memory(or very close to it )

I've run supreme commander on my WINDOWS XP 32 BIT box, and IT CRASHES with 2GB of ram, ON MY XP machine.

all the points I've made are not something I just half ass made up for the sake of arguments, but are due to my own experience with said OS's

and just for the record, every cpu sold off of the shelf today is 64bit, why not get a 64bit OS And at least have some sort of future proofing if you ever wanted to use more then 3GB of ram in ur box, with prices of DDR2 today i wouldn't think twice.


FYI I'm a jr software developer and my points are points that I make from what I've learned
and you're right, you should stay off the forums, people who assume they are the know all of everything have no place in debates or the search for more information on a subject.

And no, XP does not handle Supreme commander better then Vista in terms of 2GB limitations, cuz an XP machine crashes just the same.

If you want to add some LOGIC to this problem, why dont we assume that neither you or anand knows what is actually going on behind the scenes, and the fact that MSFT released vista, AFTER releasing XP, logically speaking, after designing the memory management in windows XP, a company the size and quality that MS is today, I doubt they would take a step backwards.
 
nigerian_businessman said:
Really, you're pissing in the wind. Now I remember why I decided to stay out of this forum. It reminds me of the lunch room in high school, and makes me want to choke the stupid out of people.
Click to expand...

Thanks I had no experience with the OS forum before, I didn't realize the level cognitive Bias when dealing with a choice of OS. I keep scratching my head at how people will put up blinders to deny there is a problem here because it is their pet OS.

You have 2GB of user address space. Vista steals up to half of that and the answer is either the applications are at fault? or you should go to Vista64??

COH uses 1.3 GB. No problem in XP, but with Vista chewing up 900MB, you are now over 2GB and you crash. Apparently this is the games fault? We need Vista64??

Umm how about why is Vista stealing half the address space? This is not a case of an application pushing the 2GB limit, this is the case of an application well within the limit and the OS blowing it big time. There is no need for 64 bit addressing here without this huge Vista bug/bad feature.

Diehard Vista Guys: I appreciate your continued beta testing of Vista, but please at least try to recognize the bugs and report them so I get a cleaned up OS when I switch in another year or two.
 
nigerian_businessman said:
Except for when the previous version of the OS handles the 'problem' better than the shiny new flagship OS. Then the problem is with the new version of the OS, since the old one managed the boundary pushing just fine.

Or did you miss that part of the article?
Click to expand...

Nope, didn't miss that part at all. I read it and, unlike some people contributing to the thread I realise full well that the only part of "handles it well" relevent here is avoiding a system crash.

Simple fact is, though, that when boundaries are being pushed that far in an intensive 3D game the thing's gonna crawl like a dog with two broken back legs anyway! You gotta throw more memory at it, irrespective of which OS version you're trying to run it under! And when you're throwing more memory at the applications up around that point you also gotta make the transition to the 64-bit platform.



Edit:

Diehard Vista Guys: I appreciate your continued beta testing of Vista, but please at least try to recognize the bugs and report them so I get a cleaned up OS when I switch in another year or two.
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Are you kidding me that you're STILL going to be clinging to that 2Gb of RAM and 32-bit Windows TWO MORE YEARS down the track?
 
nigerian_businessman said:
Except for when the previous version of the OS handles the 'problem' better than the shiny new flagship OS. Then the problem is with the new version of the OS, since the old one managed the boundary pushing just fine.
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What you are not understanding is Vista has nothing wrong with it in this area.
Vista is fixing issues that XP HAD WRONG, that now the programs (that were written wrong for XP) now won't work when something is done [more] correctly in Vista! Just think about that while (seriously...) I'm not going to go back and explain everything that many others have in the past (and on other threads).

And for the record, any gamer that is trying to run massive games (or applications) with less physical RAM than required, is the worst gamer I have ever seen in my life.
 
zacdl said:
And for the record, any gamer that is trying to run massive games (or applications) with less physical RAM than required, is the worst gamer I have ever seen in my life.
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That's not the issue here though. The issue is that 32 bit Vista seems to reserve significantly more address space than 32 bit XP (perhaps with good reason, but nonetheless it is still problematic for users on 32 bit systems attempting to run applications that push the limits of addressable memory). The amount of physical memory isn't relevent. I must admit that this makes it seem like you haven't read the article (or your comment was a non-sequitur?).

And yes, obviously going to a full 64 bit system (w/ applications) resolves this issue.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
FYI I'm a jr software developer and my points are points that I make from what I've learned
and you're right, you should stay off the forums, people who assume they are the know all of everything have no place in debates or the search for more information on a subject.

And no, XP does not handle Supreme commander better then Vista in terms of 2GB limitations, cuz an XP machine crashes just the same.

If you want to add some LOGIC to this problem, why dont we assume that neither you or anand knows what is actually going on behind the scenes, and the fact that MSFT released vista, AFTER releasing XP, logically speaking, after designing the memory management in windows XP, a company the size and quality that MS is today, I doubt they would take a step backwards.
Click to expand...

I hate it when people bring up their credentials, but since you did it I will answer in kind. I am an experienced software developer and I have been employed full time since the early 90's. I started writing microcontroller code both with Motorola memory mapped architectures(clean) and Intel flavor segmented architectures (not so clean) in assembly language and trying to eek out every efficiency possible. I am a bit head and I love writing assembly for different architectures. It tends to create a phobia about waste (not a bad thing) and that carries over to today were I write driver level code for Cell phone Base Station Controllers. I have always worked close to the hardware and I have a very clear understanding address space issues involved. I also have a BSC in Computer Science FWIW. The experience counts for more.

But you shouldn't need deep technical knowledge to see there is a problem here and you are not even fully grasping what the article says.

Supreme Commander will crash on both XP and Vista systems unmodified.
But it will not crash on an XP system once 3GT and large address awareness is tweaked.
It will still crash under these circumstances with Vista.

Company of Heros shows no sign of crashing on an unmodified XP (it only uses 1.3GB address space) system and definite indication it will crash on unmodified Vista system (where it uses more than 2GB address space). Also who knows what else will crash, or how much more will crash if you were to use an ATI 1GB VRam card. Stop thinking this is merely a Supreme commander issue. Throw in that 1GB card and a lot more will likely crash.

On whether this is a feature or a bug, and why this is happening. I think Anand has a decent handle on it. It is a security feature, essentially for DRM, the video memory is remapped to user application space, this is the only allowable programming access to the video card. Why this is done is to prevent a second application from checking the memory while playing protected streams (DRM's Video, bluRay etc) so they can't be copied. The problem is the massive loss of address space. MS is choosing DRM security over user memory space in Vista.

There is some indication that MS is aware and working on this. I would be interested in finding out how they get around this if they bother. While It would be easy to switch the system to a less secure mode, it would be difficult to have it be secure (and heavy consumer) for some and not for other applications. Then again maybe they don't need to fix it because most people here seem to think losing half their address space is a reasonable tradeoff to keep themselves from trying to pirate their own video.

Personally I don't feel the need to sacrifice my address space, to keep me from trying to pirate my purchased content on my own machine.
 
Snowdog said:
Thanks I had no experience with the OS forum before, I didn't realize the level cognitive Bias when dealing with a choice of OS. I keep scratching my head at how people will put up blinders to deny there is a problem here because it is their pet OS.
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You really have a lot of nerve coming in here, posting an article like yours, which goes against the very warnings put forth by the mods, and then you act surprised at the reaction you get? Are you serious?

Let's add some logic, since you've been throwing that word around. How many goddamn threads have been started by someone trying to be special, trying to stoke the flames, with the SOLE purpose of pissing people off? My guess is that number easily tops 100. Now, you come in here, following the same pattern, only to cop an attitude with people who openly, and tastefully disagree with you? Again, are you serious?

One goddamn article doesn't mean a thing. I could write an article on my website about how only people with a superiority complex have user names with the words Snow and Dog in them....and would that suddenly become a fact?

Now, here's some information to go on, as others have posted their OWN results as well. I have CoH running as a test on my wife's PC, which is currently running Vista Home Premium x86. You can check out her PC's specs in my sig, which includes a PCI-E card with 256 MB of memory. The game loads, and runs perfectly with her 2 GB of memory installed. Just for laughs, I pulled one of her sticks (easily fellas, no gutter talk in here), so she only had 1 GB of system memory. The game ran...not well mind you, but it ran without errors. I was hitting the hard drive quite a bit, but I wasn't crashing out of it. It certainly wasn't perfectly playable, but it ran.

So, the point others have been trying to make, and you've been ignoring, is that this isn't as big of a deal as you make it sound, simply because it doesn't affect everyone. I was able to play CoH on my system with only 2 GB of memory and Vista Ultimate x86 before I doubled the RAM and went to x64. If this was cause for alarm, as you are trying to get us all the believe, we would ALL be having problems. The very basis of a scientific experiment is that it's repeatable. This is not.

Now, where do we go from here? Oh, right. You drop the know-it-all attitude. You contribute to the thread, and you lose the ridiculous "OMG, kill Vista and hang BillyG" attitude. The regulars arouns here are sick and tired of attention whores starting threads simply to rile other people up. We're sick of it, and your thread, regardless of your real intentions, followed this pattern to a T. The only warning that should have been given about the OS subforum is that attention whoring isn't smiled upon. If you have a legitimate topic to discuss, do so with logic and civility, and not with a gun in hand, ready to fire at anyone who doesn't conform to your thinking.

Sincerely,
The old and cranky Purveyor Of Logic.
 
This has the bounds of discussion about the OS and more into personalities....read the sticky folks.
 
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