Memory leaks are real. So, what happens is that when you launch a piece of software, the executable goes to the operating system and says, "I need a specific amount of RAM." The OS will check the page file (a record of all currently active RAM addresses), and it will assign as much memory as the executable requested. As you continue to use the software, it will periodically need to go back and say, "hey, I need some more RAM," and the OS will check, and if it can, it will assign that to the software. When the program is done with the memory, it should go back to the OS, and release the memory it's no longer using. A memory leak occurs when the software doesn't release any of its unneeded memory. In a lot of cases (memory leaks or no), when the executable goes to the OS and says, "I need memory," but the OS is unable to provide that, the software will crash. Now, it's not the only way this can crash, but memory leaks are quite real.
That's a good explanation! So, is that what's happening here? The software IS giving the allocation back to the CPU, but it's taking it sweet time doing it, causing it to cross the 32-bit wall?
Yeah, I tend to play TTW with mods, and after I've played a save for a few hours, it starts to crash roughly ever 2 hours. So I have to put a timer on for 2 hours, and make damn sure I save often. (granted it only takes like 30 seconds to get back in after it crashes, so it's not that bad).
@@Snoogen11 That's interesting. NV crashes don't tend to be a specific amount of time. Fallout 4 Survival, on the other hand, will totally dependably crash exactly 45 seconds before you make it to a bed. Playing FO4 Survival without a mod that lets you save is a bit batty. Just self-police, it's a single-player game and all. How well does TTW play with other mods? I'm guessing it can't use FO3 mods?
@@speedingoffenceFrom release New Vegas had massive memory limitations, significant chunks of the game were cut because of it. In order to even release dlc for Vegas, with each addon Obsidian actually had to go into the base game and delete files, items, NPC's and more to get them to function. Off the top of my head examples include the kids chasing the rat in freeside, at release there were two kids, later they took one away, one of the gates originally had 3 kings who stand outside, all three were later removed. There's 100's of examples of this throughout the game, while small, they all added up and show how desperate the team at obsidian was to manage the memory leak problem, especially for the consoles.
make a save at the very beginning of the game at doc henrys house, then every time you launch NV load that save before loading your desired save from in game and it wont infinite loading screen
Personally, I've noticed that NV (and all games made with Bethesdas gamebryo engine, from FO3, to Skyrim, to FO4) tends to crash often in relation to autosaves. Turning off autosaves decreases instances of crashing (including the infamous infinite loading screen). I'm not technically savy in any way, so I couldn't tell you why, but it does.
@@DogMechanic i think its because they never cull auto saves or keep to0 many or something like that had the issue with skyrim where loading would take longer and longer deleted about 20 saves and the loading speed back up
Were you on the Xbox? One of the developer interviews, they say something like, "Yeah, we knew we had memory issues. Another developer taught us a trick to crash the Xbox and restart it behind the scenes, so if you ever had a really long load time on the xbox, that was us rebooting the entire xbox to get a clean memory slate."
It crashes a ludicrous amount even completely vanilla I’ve been playing PC games since like 1995 and I’ve never seen one that has crashed half as much as new Vegas has in this playthrough I started a couple weeks back It’s probably crashed more on me in this 70 hour playthrough than every other game I’ve ever played combined, it’s actually insane. If it wasn’t such a good RPG nobody would play it at all lol
@@MarchochiasThe pipeline goes like this Vanilla crashes once every hour or so You install the basic mods to change this, now it crashes every 3 hours You put QoL mods because you realize some things are tedious after playing for prolongued time Now you're back to square one, it crashes just as often as vanilla
"Purge Cell Buffers" is a classic mod from ten years ago that does just this. It purges the cell buffers which are the interior/exterior areas loaded in memory.
PCB is not a recommended fix. It also affects savegames, game logic, etc. The modern modding scene has some very impressive solutions. Look up Viva New Vegas modding guide - it splits it up very clearly into bugfixes and the other stuff it wants to do.
@@SeanNaut Ditto, several other mods that are included in Viva New Vegas solve this issue and others much more effectively. Its what you get when you make a 10/10 game on a 3/10 outdated engine and never improve it for over a decade
A memory leak is when memory is used, but then never freed. This has all of the hallmarks of the memory leak. Although I would expect it to crash around 2 GB, because that's the max memory a 32-bit application can allocate. It's a shame they never ported it to 64-bit, could probably go a lot longer before a crash.
STALKER engine moving onto a 64-bit engine was a godsent, so many less crashes, I hope new vegas gets a complete remaster or re-engine of some sort with all the fixes included, on 64 bit, this game deserves so much more
Just started NV for the first time on my series X the other day, I’m like 28 hours in. I can always feel the crash coming and it happens and this explains perfectly why. Also explains why sometimes going indoors where you’ve already been is an instant thing and doesn’t load at all
Nice bro I just started my first run on New Vegas too on the series S and I can agree with what you said. The game crashed twice on me the first was unptedictable but somehow I new the second was coming on.
You should make a followup on the mods that fix the crashes and what they do, as some are truly insane. The JohnnyGuitar NVSE pack, New Vegas Anti Crash, the New Vegas Stutter Remover, the New Vegas Tick Fix, the New Vegas Heap Replacer, JIP LN NVSE, and most of all lStewieAl's Tweaks and Engine Fixes, there's a whole lot to the point that I'm playing heavily modded, and have completely ceased my game from crashing at all from standard issues. New mod fixes are insane.
I don't think Anti Crash and Stutter Remover are compatible with Tick Fix. Also, those former two mods will cause MORE problems if you're trying to play them on Windows 10, the nexus mods and lStewieAl have recommended to just stick with Tick Fix and DXVK if you're playing on newer systems.
@@speedingoffence Coming from a modder, you'll probably only want to try out New Vegas Tick Fix, New Vegas Heap Replacer, OneTweak, ActorCause Save Bloat Fix, and LStewieAL's Tweaks alongside its included INI and his Engine Optimizations mod. The other mods mentioned (NVAC and NVSR) are outdated and unsafe to use. JohnnyGuitar and JIP LN mostly add new scripting functions for other mods, but also fix some engine bugs. DXVK is interesting if you'd like to compare OpenGL rendering performance with DirectX. Heap Replacer also has some stability downsides to it, or so I've heard. Tick Fix has some INI settings you can mess around with to fix the DX texture pool and prevent crashes from higher memory use (disabled by default). A lot of crashes are caused by bad scripts, vanilla and modded. YUP and TTW fix most of the vanilla ones. Other reasons include deleted references, bad navmesh, incorrectly structured meshes, and faulty load orders, but these are rarely issues for vanilla setups. You can learn more from the Viva New Vegas guide and its Moddinglinked affiliates, like the NV Optimization Guide.
FNV is a 32 bit application, thus can only use at the very most 4GB of ram (2^32 = 4,294,967,295 bytes = 4.2 GB technically). However, OS manufacturers had set a 2GB limits for 32-bit applications (because your whole system couldn't have more than 4GB either at the time when 32-bit operating systems were the norm), thus developers could put a flag on their application to allow up to 3GB if you're using a 32-bit system or up to 4GB (the absolute hard limit) if you're running a 64-bit system for demanding applications, such as games. The developers did not choose to do so, instead trying to be more careful with their memory allocations and deallocations (not careful enough it seems). That's the *real* why as to why FNV can only use 2GB by default. Other people have gone into the technical jargon as to what happens when the program asks for more and more memory until the OS terminates the program (yes, the OS itself terminates the program for its own safety and that of other programs). And the reason the game has not been recompiled in 64 bit is because only Bethesda has access to the source code, there's nothing any modder could do without that source code.
Yeah so alternatives would need to be found, one being new vegas reloaded which has a different memory allocation, or you could make textures and meshes in RAM a smaller mirror and have the VRAM do the bulk, or if we found a way to inject direct storage, you could have textures and meshes skip RAM and go to VRAM directly to reduce RAM usage. Last ditch would be to have an AI decompile and recompile the exe into 64 bit. (EXPERIMENTAL)
The OS sets a 2GB limit for the application because the OS itself needs to keep data in the application's address space. So Microsoft just split it 50:50 to be safe. As you point out, there is a flag you can set that tells Windows to give your program 3GB instead. Also, technically one gigabyte of RAM is exactly 1024*1024*1024 = 1 073 741 824 bytes. Still, that can't be why the game is crashing, as it is using much less than even 2GB of memory when it does.
@@pleaserespond3984 the 2GB (or more) limit also counts VRAM and some pre-allocated memory by the OS. The author of this video released a part 2 of this to explain why it doesn't crash at 2GB exactly and that's the given reason.
if it was as easy as recompiling, most games from before 64-bit processors becoming ubiquitous would already have a 64-bit version. all the game's code expects 32-bit pointers and so do the OS functions that it calls so a lot more time consuming work would have to be done to have a 64-bit version.
@@sylvann7501 TL;DR: Yes, it's possible. Unfortunately, it would take far too much time for any group of modders to decompile FNV just for it to be (probably) illegal for them to do it anyway. You're much better off programming a new engine from scratch (look at final paragraph of this ... very long (I'm sorry)... comment). Keep reading if you want all the details. Technically any software can be decompiled at least to machine code (the literal instructions your machine reads to make what you see on the screen possible). How close you get back to what the original programmers wrote depends heavily on the language and how much time people have spent trying to make a decompiler. In the worst case where you can only recover machine code, you can forget about it because you'll have to look through millions of lines of highly unreadable machine code. I will say that it is humanly unfeasible to do anything with that. Not worth the human lifetimes of work that that would require. Best case is that you get actual lines of readable code similar to what the programmers initially wrote, albeit losing the names of any variables and functions (they will all be replaced with shorthand that the compilers decided on to squeeze as much performance as possible). In this case, you'll still have to go through all code one line at a time to understand what each line of code does, but at least you won't have nearly as much code to go through if it was machine code. This would still take *a lot* of work. Unfortunately, one must know a lot about what language the game was written in and probably also what compiler was used. Very little seems to be known about what FNV was written in, so you're most likely dealing with the worst case scenario here. Aside from that, it's *probably* illegal and almost certainly against the EULA to reverse engineer FNV's engine with the end goal to redistribute it. You'll be getting a few letters from Bethesda if you tried to upload your new version of the game anywhere (if any legit place even allows it). Somewhat good news for you though, the Morrowind engine (a precursor to FNV's engine) was successfully built from scratch (openMW) as to circumvent any anti-reverse engineering clause, and it was written as a 64 bit program and they specifically mention removing the 4GB limit. It seems to run Morrowind perfectly great, even being able to use Morrowind mods themselves! Some progress was made into feeding it FNV assets (look up a channel called cc9cii on youtube) but progress seems to have stopped. This method of "recompiling" the game by just rewriting it from scratch has only been feasibly done for older, simpler games (games such as the original DOOM, or even also the first 2 fallout games).
Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were both made to work on the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. Those had to pull data from DVD and/or hard drive often, so Bethesda made the game hold assets in the little bit of RAM that those systems had for a long as possible. When ported to PC, the games are still holding as much in RAM as they can till what appears to be a 1GB (ish) hard cap. And it seems the way they mapped their memory allocations can get unstable when you keep the buffer near full. When I played Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I was running an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ heavily overclocked with 4GB of RAM and an overclocked ATi Radeon X1950 Pro AGP graphics card, the games looked and ran beautifully, but they would crash after playing for awhile if I did not fast travel for long stretches, where as the PlayStation 3 could play for hours on end with no crashes. I guess as a quirk of porting to PC from the consoles, they did not create a memory leak, just a memory buffer overrun within the game. Makes a lot more sense as to why I have seen friends with lower end PCs at the time play perfectly fine for hours on end as well without crashes, the game did not get to exceed its own memory buffer.
@@iseeu46 Yes, 360 is the "definitive" version of F:NV, DLC content was also affected negatively by the game's port onto PC/PS3. PC only supercedes the 360 version of the game with fan patches/mods. TriangleCity has a series discussing cut content from the game, but as part of the series he discusses nearly every "famous" bug/glitch associated with the game that's tied to peculiarities (like cut content or rare one-off behavior scripts). As part of this, he details some of the biggest differences between the game versions, it's definitely worth checking out if you like background noise and want more video game trivia to clog your brain with :)
New Vegas on the PS3 is infamous for freezing every 30 minutes or so the farther you are in the game since the devs didn’t know how to make the game run correctly with the PS3s split RAM and Fallout 3 had the same problem.
@@nonstopmaximum2141 Honestly from playing on the ps3 version for several years you could tell when the game would crash by watching how it loaded from door transitions. If your game got choppy or somewhat slow you should've saved there and reset your console to flush the ram. This also tied in too the save file size when you've played through multiple dlc's. The longer you've played a save file the more often you needed to reset the console
Ive never really seen this topic covered before, its a really cool and interesting topic, and you covered it very well, I do hope this video gets recommended to a ton more people. You did a great job and you should be proud of this video.
Thanks! Mostly I'm hoping it reaches that one pair of ears that knows how to find that flag to make that mod... "Fixing New Vegas" is one of those life-achievements I'd be happy to share!
The fuck? This topic has been actively covered since the game launched, so much so that one of highest charting mods for it is the 4GB patcher that runs the game in a 64bit executable, therefore doubling the amount of available RAM.
I originally played this game in Xbox 360. There was a whole empty region of the map that would crash the game. I learned the boundaries of that crash area and walked around. I saved obsessively. This game helped me immensely. I had just gotten my wisdom teeth out and was on pain meds. So my memories of the game are special and fuzzy.
If you ever regrow them and get wisdom teeth pulled again (somehow), I'd recommend Cruelty Squad. That was the game I played when dealing with the pain (I wasn't given pain meds besides to take Tylenol and ibuprofen). It enhanced the experience.
@@Bova-Fettthat’s crazy I got 4 removed and they loaded me up with pain meds like more than for a broken leg or kidney stone lol I was tutoring someone in math with a swollen face feeling great
@@Bova-Fett I'm glad I grew up during the beginning of the opiods, they got he high af for the first time in the 7th grade I think it was when they pulled them all. I'm deathly allergic to ibuprofen, naproxen and aspirin though as an anaphylaxis.
I like your comment. I think your assessment is spot on. What I struggle with is the definition. I think it's a bit too subjective, and I prefer my definitions unambiguous. That being said, I had to think about it for a bit, and I certainly wouldn't consider it 'wrong'. I think reasonable people could disagree on this.
Great video. It's really cool seeing the CZcams generation find these issues all over again. You nailed it. 4GB Patch and a cell purging mod (Looks like Stewies is the one that works in 2023) will do a great job of resolving this specific issue. Using those will make FNV run for *much* longer.
Is there a cell purging mod for Fallout 3? Also, whenever I've used the 4 GB Patch on a game, it made the .exe unrecogniseable and I had to revert. Don't suppose you know the cause/fix?
those modders use something like cell buffering, not sure the technical differences myself but i would wager that they could help you out. i see three of them on Nexus. and for the 4gb patch, are you referring to 3 or NV? either way, you might need to elevate the mod loader you're using and/or the new .exe file to launch as Administrator. that's what worked for me using Vortex on NV just recently. shouldn't matter which mod loader though @@MaddBadgerr
> It's really cool seeing the CZcams generation find these issues all over again. What? In what other context is not making use of knowledge of the past helpful? Would you say something simila in a context of war? "It's good those kids learned that engaging is war is stupid, after having engaged in war."
as computers change, so does backwards compatibility. these games only get older, and new problems arise. it's good to see people still interested in keeping these games running, so we kinda need new generations of people to do just that. i think that's the point of what was said, anyway. no need to overanalyze the choice of words@@rabbitcreative
I often encountered this on Fallout 3 on the PS3. I found that it mostly occurred during combat in object rich environments so I would always pick up loot, loose trash and tin cans as I walked around and put then in a bin or sell them to a merchant. By removing all unneeded processing requirements the chance of game crash fell dramatically but never hit zero... Bethesda is always one glitch ahead of the players!
Makes a lot more sense why i would start to "feel" like i was going to crash. Because it would always happen in these locations. One thing I would also notice when a crash was imminent is that the audio would break for everything except the pipboy.
New Vegas crashes for a variety of reasons, most crashes are related to bad meshes/navmeshing. The memory stuff can be fixed by cell purging and using the 4gb patch. I think nvtf or Stewie's tweaks has the cell purging one
I’ve never been able to play FNV and believe me, Ive tried. Followed every step word for word with mods that are supposed to “fix” the issue. Never worked. Never been able to leave the starting zone, never held a weapon, talked to one person and the game constantly died.
@@aliasilver_636 Speaking from experience sometimes you need to tweak the mods a little, I ended up having to dive into the stutter remover file to flip some toggles.that improved the smoothness at the.cost of stability.
There's something going on around the Helios one and the Repconn facility. Maybe a few less cache doors than there should be, maybe the sheer amount of trash around, maybe something entirely different. Although NPCs obviously make the game more volitile the more of them you have, areas with a lot of junk can act quite wildly. I think the physics engine was just a little too memory voracious for the time. I'm only speculating tho
Looked it up, and Fallout: New Vegas uses the Havoc Physics engine. But apparently, New Vegas had to be updated to a newer version (from Fallout 3) during development, which was stated as one of the biggest technical issues during development. So, that could be what’s going on with those areas.
From working with mods a bit, I have a hunch the issue with crashes around Helios One have to do with loading the junkyard behind Novac when moving in and out of its vicinity. It might back your idea that it’s the objects that cause the issue. That IS just a hunch on my part, though, not anything I’ve rigorously tested.
I actually had an issue where I physically could not enter RepConn, even with console commands, on a certain save file. I had to go on a different save file and load it in which, for whatever reason, allowed me an extra couple milliseconds to get into RepConn before it crashed which allowed for an autosave. I think this means that your character has something to do with it, and on a separate save file I was able to do RepConn just fine. This one specific save has been troubling me more than anything else.
I should add that the purpose of that autosave was so that I could actually load into RepConn so that I could maybe get it into RAM, making it load properly on the other save file (which worked!)
This is fascinating. I love it when people can learn technical things about how games work by just playing them. This feels like a Pannenkoek video for New Vegas. Awesome work dude.
A 32-bit app on Windows is almost always limited to 2 GB (2,048 MB) of memory for both itself and any libraries (aka ".DLL files") it needs to run, and the memory taken up by those libraries is not shown in process manager. This was adequate at the time FNV was released, but in the intervening dozen plus years, the memory required by these libraries has grown quite a lot. On Windows 10, they take up nearly half of the memory available, which is why FNV crashes when it has reached about 1,000 MB, and needs to allocate more.
From my experience windows versions doesn't influence crashes Especially how FNV were rushed out of the door and other vanilla Bethesda games ran without problems so far if problematic mods aren't installed
This is a really neat video about actually showing and explaining how both memory leaks and New Vegas work. What I've always found interesting is, for my part, even when loaded up with expansion mods, I've had New Vegas crash maybe twice in the several years I've been playing. Very interesting video, nice job!
I never really considered keeping task manager open while playing new vegas. I played with some mods that would cause crashing, this would’ve been nice to have up on my second monitor. I guess I’m used to the Xbox where I’m not really concerned about crashing and couldn’t monitor the ram if I wanted to.
i keep task manager open sometimes when my RAM or CPU usage spikes randomly to help with understanding why my computer is struggling even while just doing shit like using an internet browser, makes sense to use it when your PC is chugging while gaming too, even if it just helps you understand the functionality of the application you use
I tried to finish my most recent playthrough modless, as i hadn't picked up the game in a while, and almost did it until Dead Money. That DLC had so many area transition crashes i needed 4 mods just to make the game stable enough to keep going 😭 Still finished the game though 🥳
I don't understand why you don't just use the base finish of Viva New Vegas, it literally has MUST-HAVE mods to prevent crashes, issues, bugs and everything inbetween. Like I get running modless, but the exception to that rule is optimizations and actual improvements without changing the feel, look and gameplay of the game.
@@mrazbyte3150indeed, new vegas needs the important mods to truly be playable. for example, the nude female body mod makes the game finally be playable.
Thank you for the explanation! I don't think I've ever seen this topic being covered, but it has been really nice to see an explanation, of new vegas' frequent crashes. Thank you very much!
There's probably a memory leak somewhere, but the crash does not appear to be associated with a memory leak, it might have something to do with a limited cache buffer size that doesn't get properly cleared at the right time. Either the cache buffer is allocated to before the free takes place, thus overflowing the buffer, (which may segfault, or it might intentionally crash) or something in the cache is wrongly freed as the buffer deallocator becomes more aggressive and then that wrongly freed memory is accessed, which probably creates a segfault. Also a memory leak is real, basically how they work is that you allocate memory in the program (which then asks the OS for memory) but then you at some point lose reference access to that memory in the program (the OS still knows that memory is in use, but because the program did not tell the OS that the specific memory block should be freed, it does not consider freeing it until the program is shutdown, where the OS will terminate all the memory related to the program) as a result the memory is leaked, its freely existing for the entirety of the program and the program has no way to free it because it has basically forgotten that it allocated that memory, you want a basic example of how to do this in C++, here is an example #include int main() { { int* i = new int(0); // We allocate an integer whose value is 0 into heap memory std::cout
It's too bad the answer describing memory overallocation as a memory leak is the one with 2.2k likes and this one only has 35. Memory overallocation is booking 201 tickets for a 200 seat airplane, memory leak is landing at the destination with only 199 passengers.
Well, in theory a 64-bit program should be able to handle, literally, 16 million terabytes of RAM. That being said, in theory, a 32-bit program should be able to handle 4GB, and it takes a patch to make New Vegas do that, so who knows?
@@SqualidsargeStudios The Creation Engine is basically just a Fork of the Gamebryo Engine. So down in it's core you're playing the same Engine that once ran Morrowind, only with much more parts, patches and fixes. And i guess it shows?
@@TheMygoran And Source 2 is a fork of Source which is a fork of GoldSrc which is a fork of id Tech 2 which is a fork of id Tech 1 which is a fork of the Wolfenstein 3D engine. CS2 runs like a dream with zero crashes and consistent 120+ FPS regardless. It's more about bad optimization when it comes to Starfield.
I know that when I played new Vegas on the ps3 I had to save a lot because of the frequent crashing, I also knew the signs, it would begin to stutter in seemingly open parts of the game or have a long time between load screen to in game time.
@@speedingoffence well it was made on disc for the ps3 so idk, It may have been optimized for it, but it did play nice for a good few hours before it would crash. Also remember the fun bugs that you could do with the ammo types and different weapons like using mini nukes with the laser designator
Same here with the ps3, and it would always be red rock that does it. Made me not enjoy talking to the misguided biker gang and having to do the save then exit to relaunch combo.
It's never been 2 GB usable. It's ~1.5 GB. ~512MB is reserved for system memory addresses (a part of your soundcard/network card being addressable in RAM and other essential stuff the Windows OS needs to store for the kernel and drivers to function). There's also a thing called Aperture size. It was more important with AGP cards and still today with embedded videocards. Embedded cards have no VRAM, so they use your RAM. So whatever the aperture size is, is the MB of RAM that is reserved for videocard use and not available for a program. And usually, you can configure that aperture size in your BIOS. As for the issue, it looks like there's a bug/oversight in the RAM management for the game. I know that sounds obvious but allow me to elaborate. It "could" be a bug that prevents zones from being evicted from RAM (lingering when they should be free). But I'm thinking there's probably a limit based on RAM size, and the game was never designed/tested with 2 GB or >2GB of RAM (as consoles have far far less than that). So instead of knowing "I have 1 GB of RAM never use more than that" it sees "4 GB of RAM" and has no hardcoded concept of the Windows limit of ~1.5 GB and lets it rise past 1.5 GB because it's trying to limit it at 4 GB. Because if it's simply storing too much stuff and never evicting it, then it should also be blowing up on Xbox 360 and PS3s all the time--presuming of course that the bug is in all three versions and not just the PC version.
This is good stuff! If I make a followup, would you like a mention? Also, there was an engine conversion of some sort between versions. Different version of the Havoc engine. That's probably the distinction.
Ha, having a condition to purge the oldest area when near "memory limit" and reading that "memory limit" as whatever PC has (Installed GB - Used Gb), not as whatever is really available (2GB - Used GB). This seems plausible! Exactly THE mistake which could be made and not be detected while using PC/console with 2GB RAM for testing =D And this is not a "memory leak" per se... If the game was forgetting to purge... But it does not forget, it just has the condition set wrong... NIce... OR maybe it is a condition based not on memory, but number of areas (cells as they call it in the Editor) loaded?
When you enter Camp McCarran you're leaving the Mojave worldspace and entering the McCarran one. I think what happens is that the game only keeps the cells belonging to one worldspace buffered at any given time, alongside the last few visited interior cells. Not sure whether changing worldspaces *also* purges interior cells, though. You can also manually purge the cell buffer with the pcb console command.
@@ssgoko88 What are you getting angry about? The guy in the video never mentioned worldspaces, but he went through three of them: the mojave, mccarran, and the strip. All three of them reset the memory of the game. OP was just elaborating.
@@ssgoko88 What are you on, buddy? The OP explains why places like McCarran and the Strip clean the memory, which isn't explained in the video but is established
@@ssgoko88 *Take your meds.* The game is held in worldspaces, and interact between one-another in specific ways. It's why if you throw a grenade over the strip wall nothing happens, nobody is inside that area and it's located in an entirely different place to help the issue of memory management. When you enter a new worldspace the game clears the previous one and also does not preload it, which is why going to McCarren always takes a bit longer. *Take your meds next time before commenting.*
I think I can explain why that one instance cleared the cache. In the Oblivion/Fallout3/NV engine, the game is defined by interior and exterior world spaces (basically, interior spaces get static lighting - no day/night - and do not use terrain generation). For the exterior world space, the world is divided into "cells". As the player moves from cell to cell, it buffers the cells adjacent to the player's direction of movement. When a new exterior world space is loaded that is not adjacent to the previous exterior world space, it will clear the cache. So basically: When fast traveling or moving into an entirely new "world". I'm sure other mods handle cache clearing far more competently, but in short, this method is not like something that's just attached to the door that says "clear the cache here!", instead it's more a coincidental function that happens because the place you loaded happened to be an exterior cell in a new "world", which forced the cache clear function. In order to make this a mod, every single interior space would need to be transferred to an exterior world space, which is easier said than done.
I've always thought that it was maybe a problem with my rig or that I needed to fix something I wasn't aware about. It is most definitely interesting to see how the Devs tried to overcome the shortcomings of technology in the past and how that affects the way it's played today. Hopefully the modding community will keep going at it in their efforts to polish the technical aspects of this game, even though there's only so much you can do with the engine's limitations. I'd say it's a shame that Bethesda isn't putting any real effort on modernizing one of the best game that was ever released that has their name on it. I really wish they'd put more attention on what Capcom did with Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 and started taking notes.
Really interesting watch! I used to play this on 360 back in the day and it got to the point where the game would consistently crash every 15-20 minutes. The PC version thankfully has some mods that fix the problem.
Software dev here and I can say a few things about memory leaks. 1) They are real, 2) They are usually not the problem 3) This is not one. --- what is a memory leak? --- Memory leaks are real. They are also not very common in todays software landscape. When writing in low level languages, you have to allocate and free memory manually. If you want to store something you have to manually say "Hey computer, I need 32 bits for this integer I want to store" and then you do some stuff with that integer and when you no longer care abou the integer you say "hey, I'm done with that integer, so you can mark that memory as available now." A memory leak happens when you have some function somewhere that reserves memory, but doesn't free it. Now, every time a task is completed, all the information about *how* the task was completed is typically discarded. This includes the addresses of the memory it used. So if a function doesn't free it's memory before finishing, you will never be able to recover that memory until the program restarts. This is why it's called a leak. Memory that "leaks" this way is essentially unrecoverable. Most functions don't need to allocate much memory. But if a function has 1 byte it forgets to free, and is called 60 times per second, you will be bleeding 60 bytes per second. This means you will eventually have half a gigabyte of memory that you've essentially lost track of. This is how you identify a memory leak. A memory leak's calling card is that the applications memory usage should grow over time without bound. If you leave a game running for 2 days straight and when you come back it's using 100% of your memory and lagging out, you may have a memory leak. --- Why is it no longer a problem --- Because allocating and freeing memory is actually somewhat technical and fairly easy to mess up, this used to be a huge problem and in the early days this was a fairly common type of bug. But not anymore. Most software today is written in higher level languages that do "automatic garbage collection." This means they automatically free memory. So even though they used to be a common problem, they aren't any more. But they still take the heat and are one of those terms that get thrown around a lot by people who don't really know what it means. --- why is this not a memory leak? --- Anyway, this isn't a memory leak because this isn't memory growing without bound. It knows all the areas that are loaded and that memory is able to be freed as it is deemed necessary. It's just not programmed with the foresight to see it's going to run out of space.
I don't know about the game having memory leaks but the worst place in the game is Novac because rather randomly when you leave the store in novac your save file can be corrupted so it's good practice to have more than 1 save file for your character when playing the game and to save regularly so that if your save file becomes corrupt you won't have to reload from 5 or 6 hours earlier and forgot where you were and what you were doing at that point in order to get back on track
Its definitely likely to crash there going back out when you've been playing for a reasonable time..I tend to reset the game if I've been playing for a while and need to go there..also when I've been repeating the vender restock glitch numerous times on the Wednesday and Sunday (buying ammo in large quantities) quick save then exist to main menu then back in again..I've noticed though it has a chance of crashing regardless with Elijah's shack related to vault 34 quest (I could make you care)
For some reason, that one travelling merchant and their guard never delete their gooified corpses Guess the fact that Novac is one of the first created locations explains both of those problems
@theonemasterwarhero My hunch (and it is just a hunch) is that the objects in the Novac junkyard are the proximate cause of crashes. That’s from working with mods and also noticing that crashes happen relatively often when moving around Helios One in the direction of Novac.
@@Thy_Boss Definitely sounds possible..I've never touched any of the scrap in the junkyard..only ever just interacted with Gibson in regards to repconn and getting a brain for Rex...and only ever had her appear literally on the spot (once) hostile when coming outside from helios one into the solar panel grounds. (was pretty hilarious in a wtf kind of way)
From what I can recall from my ps3 gameplay of NV, is that in the later game, mc carran became a bit of a forbidden zone to me. The game would've been running okay, all around the wasteland and other interiors. Once I entered mc carran, it would take ages to load and once loaded in became very slow, it usually went frame by frame. One time I just gave up on going in there so I've managed to literally "frame" my way out of there. Even the shutter door option to exit took a while to load up and took as spam of hitting X to activate. Than the wasteland would load up and everything returned back to normal.
Fast travelling to nearby locations can cause crashes as the game might not be able to unload the ram. Also crashes occur when the ram is loaded up (travelled some distance on foot) and you enter a purge location or fast travel, there is a slight spike in usage just before it unloads, causing a crash. At least I think this is whats happening. Corrupt saves can often be loaded by loading another working save first then loading the corrupted save.
This explains to many of the crashes I have encountered in my playthrough. The main ones I can think of specifically are when I entered Gamora and when I left the Westside slums. those must have tipped the ram limit just far enough above what the game can handle. That's really cool.
Nice. A great explanation. Plain and simple. I've played New Vegas for thousands of hours. It's without a doubt my absolute favorite game. But I never knew the exact issue behind its constant crashes, even though I've kinda got a feeling for the timing of these crashes. That video gave me much needed intel, that's for sure. Thank you.
I just use a shit ton of mods that are purposely designed to make it incredibly stable for modding. But this is honestly interesting to think about, something I didn't know I wanted to know about.
32-bit applications should be able to allocate somewhere around 2~4 gigs. I think a good portion of NV's memory is paged to the hard drive by the OS when it's not used. The real number of memory it's using (or "pages") is probably higher than 1.1 gigs
The game is supposed to be able to handle 2gb but not always the case. There is a mod that allows 4gb, careful tho there is two versions that are deprecated. I think there is also a mod that helps with random crashes caused by memory issues. I think its by stewai is the modder. Cant remember exactly.
32-bit stuff is supposed to go up to 4GB, but that has to include VRAM (I'm pretty sure) and a couple other system functions related to the game. I was using the 4GB one when I got it up to 1.35GB, but I was also a handful of texture packs, which would eat up that VRAM allocation.
@@fuzzyhair321 That doesn't matter, the game can't use more than 4GB of RAM and VRAM _combined._ It's the game's limit, not your hardware's. The memory addresses are stored in 32bit unsigned integers, so the number of bytes the game uses cannot exceed 4,294,967,295.
This might be the case too for Fallout 3 as well. I recently fixed my install of that game and it ran so smoothly but I haven't encountered a crash yet with that fresh install. I was hoping for a mod or something to make it more stable but research proved negative and then this vid magically appeared in my recommended and might just explain the problem. So maybe, if Fast Travel resets the cache a Tactical Fast Travel might help with some of the crashing by lowering the cache every so often combined with turning the game on and off in bigger areas
@@AltDelete_52 Well first things first get it on GOG its generally more stable. I mostly play Vanilla otherwise I did explore with some mods but they tended to be more trouble for the stability. I still want to try and get unique textures on the unique gear to work but playing vanilla keeps it the most stable
Tale of Two Wastelands will optimize F3 & FNV, allow you to switch from one to the other, and allow you to use many FNV mods in F3. That's why the modding community for F3 seems totally dead.
Memory leak is 100% real in programs i have watched memory usage gradually rise for no conceivable reason until a game has crash from no memory. (I cant remember game) In this case idk if its technically a leak.
This explains why older games basically require you to get off for a little bit then log back in to give the pc a break. Though now most people have fairly decent rigs. With much greater management of cooling and memory
Modern rig doesn't help with this game tho. Even if you have 128 GB of RAM, the game can only use up to 2 GB as it is a 32-bit app. Also, it appears that the game has an internal limit, which lowers the 2 GB farther to around 1GB, which I assume was made for consoles but remains in the PC version
I've always kind of wondered why this happens, thanks. My question is, is the game choosing to crash intentionally to avoid hurting a PC with minimum system requirements? Could the soft cap be raised by a mod to like three times the threshold so there would never be a risk of crash? Or is it by some fault of the computer that this limit is there in the first place/ the pc makes the game crash? I know my game always risked a crash when fast traveling in Big MT.
It's a 32-bit thing. There's a hard cap to how much RAM a 32-bit program can use. It's about 4GB, all in, including VRAM. There's technically a maximum for 64-bit programs (the current standard) as well, but it's 16 million terabytes, so we're probably good for a few more years before that becomes a problem. Someone wrote a 64-bit patch for Skyrim about 8 years back, but Bethesda patched the game so that it won't work anymore. They never said why. I remember having Skyrim use 33GB of RAM at one point, it was glorious.
@@speedingoffence Ah. So the game needs the Open Morrowind treatment to be a 64 bit game and not just a mod that runs a script, probably? Now I think I understand quite a bit more about why Open Morrowind exists.
@@Kryptnyt Actually, I don't think any one instance will trip the cap. If it purged at every instance change, I think it'd be fine. And that purge is in there, written into the McCarren gate. That being said, a 64-bit crack would be ABSOLUTELY AWESOME because we could start running 8k texture packs and... Man, the sky is the limit!
@@HattaTHEZulZILLA86 I KNOW! Sure, maybe we didn't NEED 8k textures on raindrops, and running 4 simultaneous ENBs was kinda redundant, but dammit it was sure great fun when we could! I once killed Darth Vader and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by conjuring an army of Corgis and I don't see why that was a bad thing!
Follow the Viva New Vegas modding guide, it includes all the most important crash and memory fixes. I can't explain the technicals but even when heavily modded my New Vegas never crashes.
I got trough the intro and character creation flawllessly. Did the learning the basics and went back to talk to Trudy and then the crashes started without me going in or out of the houses or leaving Good Springs. I just casually stroll to any direction for a bit and just just dies without slowling down or distorting the audio as if there was a set time limit for it to crash.
Nah the real answer is because the game is built on a foundation that was created by bethesda, and this is just what happens to everything Todd touches. Scientists have been trying to explain it for years but haven't gotten anywhere yet.
Im literally going through this game for the first time now, so this is interesting to learn about. Another interesting thing I noticed is that I get lots of these crashes on Windows but ive only had a couple when playing on Linux (Steam Deck)
I looked up Memory Leak on Wikipedia once, and it said what it was, and then said, "not to be confused with a memory leek, a vegetable that remembers things."
You're a hero for making these videos. I knew for a fact that the game itself is simply not very stable, but I can never just prove it. I'm also well aware that mod conflicts can obviously cause crashes, but again, I absolutely knew the game engine is just not very stable because of how it handles many various things. Thank you very, very much for making these videos to tackle perhaps one of the most important overarching topics regarding Fallout New Vegas.
never thought to keep an eye on the RAM like that. Although when your game crashed it looked like an instant crash-to-desktop, which isn't what I mostly get from my New Vegas crashes. Mine usually freezes up on loading screens and needs to be force quit through Task Manager. Learned a while back to always make sure Task Manager is open on the other screen whenever I launch New Vegas, because otherwise I'd have to navigate task manager with Tab and the arrow keys, only able to see what I'm working with by peeking through the Alt+Tab window. I became pretty good at that back in the day.
Thank you for making this! Yes this has been solved with mods. At the start of the Viva New Vegas guide they explain how to make the game utilise more RAM on your computer, which essentially solves the crashes.
There are many mods that handle this exact issue. I'd recommend checking out the Viva New Vegas guide. You don't have to use everything in it but the bug fixes section of the guide addresses pretty much all of these issues. Even on a slower SATA3 SSD from 10 years ago, I get near instant load times to the point where I don't even see the loading screen.
Thank you so much this might be able to help he run the game in the future, I knew there was some weird techromancy going on with this game I just didn’t know what it was
I got used to New Vegas crashing, it just became part of the experience for me in a way. Playing games of this period I acknowledge such issues are sadly a given. I give you Custom Zombies on World At War. You've display why it happens in NV at a level I never knew or appreciated the full technical details for. Thank you😊
Strangely enough even back on my pos pc I never crashed with waw custom zombies. I would occasionally get a frame drop but never enough to kill me or crash the game
In 2012 beat the game twice with crashes galore. In 2018 i managed to make the game relatively crash free but put off playing it after helping the boomers But in 2020 and 2023 it became harder I guess it's the mods... All instances of playing FNV i never play vanilla
Haha dude I love your relaxed communication, greatful that we all have that shared love for New Vegas and its funky duct taped kinks and workarounds, like an old car
Personally, my game has never crashed in Gomorrah. What gets me is fast traveling to the Strip gate and pretty much anything in Old World Blues. What a magical game.
For me, this makes sense as to why ive mostly gotten my crashes going into freeside, the strip, mcarran, and other large world spaces. Its weird though, sometimes my game will refuse to let me go into the atomic wrangler ot the king school too.
i just started another playthrough (been playing probably every 2 years since it came out) and i find that the modding scene only gets better and better at making the game is super steady, rarely a crash with my usual 55 mods installed.
Quick saving before attempting to load a new area seems to work for clearing the cache. It does still crash if you're not careful but it was a workaround that let me finish the game without resorting to mods.
there was a command prompt i used back in the day to assign more ram to various games that needed it due to memory leaks. supreme commander and fallout3 were the two games that needed it.
This explains why some people have far more crashes than others! I've been playing this game for 13 years since release and it has rarely ever crashed for me.
I started playing new vegas for the first time recently, it was my first bethesda game so seeing all the crashes really made me understand... This helped explain why it crashed a ton until I got the 4gb patch
For me it's Freeside. Doing the quests for The Kings/Followers/Atomic Wrangler all while having to go in and out of the strip is a fast way to go back to your desktop abruptly.
Memory leaks are real. So, what happens is that when you launch a piece of software, the executable goes to the operating system and says, "I need a specific amount of RAM." The OS will check the page file (a record of all currently active RAM addresses), and it will assign as much memory as the executable requested. As you continue to use the software, it will periodically need to go back and say, "hey, I need some more RAM," and the OS will check, and if it can, it will assign that to the software. When the program is done with the memory, it should go back to the OS, and release the memory it's no longer using. A memory leak occurs when the software doesn't release any of its unneeded memory. In a lot of cases (memory leaks or no), when the executable goes to the OS and says, "I need memory," but the OS is unable to provide that, the software will crash. Now, it's not the only way this can crash, but memory leaks are quite real.
That's a good explanation! So, is that what's happening here? The software IS giving the allocation back to the CPU, but it's taking it sweet time doing it, causing it to cross the 32-bit wall?
Yeah, I tend to play TTW with mods, and after I've played a save for a few hours, it starts to crash roughly ever 2 hours. So I have to put a timer on for 2 hours, and make damn sure I save often. (granted it only takes like 30 seconds to get back in after it crashes, so it's not that bad).
@@Snoogen11 That's interesting. NV crashes don't tend to be a specific amount of time. Fallout 4 Survival, on the other hand, will totally dependably crash exactly 45 seconds before you make it to a bed.
Playing FO4 Survival without a mod that lets you save is a bit batty. Just self-police, it's a single-player game and all.
How well does TTW play with other mods? I'm guessing it can't use FO3 mods?
@@speedingoffenceFrom release New Vegas had massive memory limitations, significant chunks of the game were cut because of it. In order to even release dlc for Vegas, with each addon Obsidian actually had to go into the base game and delete files, items, NPC's and more to get them to function. Off the top of my head examples include the kids chasing the rat in freeside, at release there were two kids, later they took one away, one of the gates originally had 3 kings who stand outside, all three were later removed. There's 100's of examples of this throughout the game, while small, they all added up and show how desperate the team at obsidian was to manage the memory leak problem, especially for the consoles.
@@t-hatguy Especially considering the whole 256-MB-of-RAM thing the PS3 had to deal with.
What was always more common for me in this game was the infinite loading screen, just watching the roulette infinitely spin at the bottom
Same here! I recently went back to play it again and I still save twice before I quit so that I won’t lose hours of gameplay.
make a save at the very beginning of the game at doc henrys house, then every time you launch NV load that save before loading your desired save from in game and it wont infinite loading screen
Personally, I've noticed that NV (and all games made with Bethesdas gamebryo engine, from FO3, to Skyrim, to FO4) tends to crash often in relation to autosaves. Turning off autosaves decreases instances of crashing (including the infamous infinite loading screen). I'm not technically savy in any way, so I couldn't tell you why, but it does.
@@DogMechanic i think its because they never cull auto saves or keep to0 many or something like that
had the issue with skyrim where loading would take longer and longer
deleted about 20 saves and the loading speed back up
Were you on the Xbox? One of the developer interviews, they say something like, "Yeah, we knew we had memory issues. Another developer taught us a trick to crash the Xbox and restart it behind the scenes, so if you ever had a really long load time on the xbox, that was us rebooting the entire xbox to get a clean memory slate."
It crashed because i installed 100mods that dont like eachother, thats why
It crashes a ludicrous amount even completely vanilla
I’ve been playing PC games since like 1995 and I’ve never seen one that has crashed half as much as new Vegas has in this playthrough I started a couple weeks back
It’s probably crashed more on me in this 70 hour playthrough than every other game I’ve ever played combined, it’s actually insane. If it wasn’t such a good RPG nobody would play it at all lol
Double them and give it to the next Courier
@@MarchochiasThe pipeline goes like this
Vanilla crashes once every hour or so
You install the basic mods to change this, now it crashes every 3 hours
You put QoL mods because you realize some things are tedious after playing for prolongued time
Now you're back to square one, it crashes just as often as vanilla
Thats why we need a 64 bit version
@@cd7677 and then save game corrupts because you kept saving on top of it instead of making a new one each time
"Purge Cell Buffers" is a classic mod from ten years ago that does just this. It purges the cell buffers which are the interior/exterior areas loaded in memory.
PCB is not a recommended fix. It also affects savegames, game logic, etc. The modern modding scene has some very impressive solutions. Look up Viva New Vegas modding guide - it splits it up very clearly into bugfixes and the other stuff it wants to do.
@@SeanNaut Ditto, several other mods that are included in Viva New Vegas solve this issue and others much more effectively. Its what you get when you make a 10/10 game on a 3/10 outdated engine and never improve it for over a decade
Yeah... no. That mod corrupts your save file and typically breaks more than it fixes.
4GB patcher helps really good and newvegas anticrash.💯👌✌
I tweak those two numbers basing from the guides in Nexusmods NVAC(If im correct) I get to lessen my crashes
A memory leak is when memory is used, but then never freed. This has all of the hallmarks of the memory leak. Although I would expect it to crash around 2 GB, because that's the max memory a 32-bit application can allocate. It's a shame they never ported it to 64-bit, could probably go a lot longer before a crash.
Thank goodness for the 4GB patcher
It doesnt patch the game. It starts a 64 bit exe that then launches the game so the os assigns the whole thing the 4gb allocation of the 64bit exe.
@@highlandrab19 The aptly named.
STALKER engine moving onto a 64-bit engine was a godsent, so many less crashes, I hope new vegas gets a complete remaster or re-engine of some sort with all the fixes included, on 64 bit, this game deserves so much more
@@highlandrab19 Is that what that command prompt is?
Just started NV for the first time on my series X the other day, I’m like 28 hours in. I can always feel the crash coming and it happens and this explains perfectly why. Also explains why sometimes going indoors where you’ve already been is an instant thing and doesn’t load at all
Pretty sad that I can say the same thing about Starfield. There's just those subtle changes that signal an incoming crash in the next 5-10 minutes.
Man, Playing Old world blues the game can crash just by going to a certain spot.
Nice bro I just started my first run on New Vegas too on the series S and I can agree with what you said. The game crashed twice on me the first was unptedictable but somehow I new the second was coming on.
@@josephmcsticc164i know exactly what you’re talking about. everything makes sense now😂
@@scumganz If you're gonna mention the sink balcony, that's one place for consistent crashes.
You should make a followup on the mods that fix the crashes and what they do, as some are truly insane. The JohnnyGuitar NVSE pack, New Vegas Anti Crash, the New Vegas Stutter Remover, the New Vegas Tick Fix, the New Vegas Heap Replacer, JIP LN NVSE, and most of all lStewieAl's Tweaks and Engine Fixes, there's a whole lot to the point that I'm playing heavily modded, and have completely ceased my game from crashing at all from standard issues. New mod fixes are insane.
I didn't expect this video to do this well, but ya, that's probably happening. Thanks for the suggestions!
@@speedingoffenceI'd watch it.
I don't think Anti Crash and Stutter Remover are compatible with Tick Fix. Also, those former two mods will cause MORE problems if you're trying to play them on Windows 10, the nexus mods and lStewieAl have recommended to just stick with Tick Fix and DXVK if you're playing on newer systems.
@@bigswigg3631 Mentioning them for the video idea, not all together
@@speedingoffence Coming from a modder, you'll probably only want to try out New Vegas Tick Fix, New Vegas Heap Replacer, OneTweak, ActorCause Save Bloat Fix, and LStewieAL's Tweaks alongside its included INI and his Engine Optimizations mod.
The other mods mentioned (NVAC and NVSR) are outdated and unsafe to use. JohnnyGuitar and JIP LN mostly add new scripting functions for other mods, but also fix some engine bugs.
DXVK is interesting if you'd like to compare OpenGL rendering performance with DirectX. Heap Replacer also has some stability downsides to it, or so I've heard. Tick Fix has some INI settings you can mess around with to fix the DX texture pool and prevent crashes from higher memory use (disabled by default).
A lot of crashes are caused by bad scripts, vanilla and modded. YUP and TTW fix most of the vanilla ones. Other reasons include deleted references, bad navmesh, incorrectly structured meshes, and faulty load orders, but these are rarely issues for vanilla setups.
You can learn more from the Viva New Vegas guide and its Moddinglinked affiliates, like the NV Optimization Guide.
FNV is a 32 bit application, thus can only use at the very most 4GB of ram (2^32 = 4,294,967,295 bytes = 4.2 GB technically). However, OS manufacturers had set a 2GB limits for 32-bit applications (because your whole system couldn't have more than 4GB either at the time when 32-bit operating systems were the norm), thus developers could put a flag on their application to allow up to 3GB if you're using a 32-bit system or up to 4GB (the absolute hard limit) if you're running a 64-bit system for demanding applications, such as games. The developers did not choose to do so, instead trying to be more careful with their memory allocations and deallocations (not careful enough it seems).
That's the *real* why as to why FNV can only use 2GB by default. Other people have gone into the technical jargon as to what happens when the program asks for more and more memory until the OS terminates the program (yes, the OS itself terminates the program for its own safety and that of other programs).
And the reason the game has not been recompiled in 64 bit is because only Bethesda has access to the source code, there's nothing any modder could do without that source code.
Yeah so alternatives would need to be found, one being new vegas reloaded which has a different memory allocation, or you could make textures and meshes in RAM a smaller mirror and have the VRAM do the bulk, or if we found a way to inject direct storage, you could have textures and meshes skip RAM and go to VRAM directly to reduce RAM usage.
Last ditch would be to have an AI decompile and recompile the exe into 64 bit. (EXPERIMENTAL)
The OS sets a 2GB limit for the application because the OS itself needs to keep data in the application's address space. So Microsoft just split it 50:50 to be safe. As you point out, there is a flag you can set that tells Windows to give your program 3GB instead. Also, technically one gigabyte of RAM is exactly 1024*1024*1024 = 1 073 741 824 bytes. Still, that can't be why the game is crashing, as it is using much less than even 2GB of memory when it does.
@@pleaserespond3984 the 2GB (or more) limit also counts VRAM and some pre-allocated memory by the OS. The author of this video released a part 2 of this to explain why it doesn't crash at 2GB exactly and that's the given reason.
if it was as easy as recompiling, most games from before 64-bit processors becoming ubiquitous would already have a 64-bit version. all the game's code expects 32-bit pointers and so do the OS functions that it calls so a lot more time consuming work would have to be done to have a 64-bit version.
@@sylvann7501 TL;DR: Yes, it's possible. Unfortunately, it would take far too much time for any group of modders to decompile FNV just for it to be (probably) illegal for them to do it anyway. You're much better off programming a new engine from scratch (look at final paragraph of this ... very long (I'm sorry)... comment).
Keep reading if you want all the details.
Technically any software can be decompiled at least to machine code (the literal instructions your machine reads to make what you see on the screen possible). How close you get back to what the original programmers wrote depends heavily on the language and how much time people have spent trying to make a decompiler.
In the worst case where you can only recover machine code, you can forget about it because you'll have to look through millions of lines of highly unreadable machine code. I will say that it is humanly unfeasible to do anything with that. Not worth the human lifetimes of work that that would require.
Best case is that you get actual lines of readable code similar to what the programmers initially wrote, albeit losing the names of any variables and functions (they will all be replaced with shorthand that the compilers decided on to squeeze as much performance as possible). In this case, you'll still have to go through all code one line at a time to understand what each line of code does, but at least you won't have nearly as much code to go through if it was machine code. This would still take *a lot* of work.
Unfortunately, one must know a lot about what language the game was written in and probably also what compiler was used. Very little seems to be known about what FNV was written in, so you're most likely dealing with the worst case scenario here.
Aside from that, it's *probably* illegal and almost certainly against the EULA to reverse engineer FNV's engine with the end goal to redistribute it. You'll be getting a few letters from Bethesda if you tried to upload your new version of the game anywhere (if any legit place even allows it).
Somewhat good news for you though, the Morrowind engine (a precursor to FNV's engine) was successfully built from scratch (openMW) as to circumvent any anti-reverse engineering clause, and it was written as a 64 bit program and they specifically mention removing the 4GB limit. It seems to run Morrowind perfectly great, even being able to use Morrowind mods themselves! Some progress was made into feeding it FNV assets (look up a channel called cc9cii on youtube) but progress seems to have stopped.
This method of "recompiling" the game by just rewriting it from scratch has only been feasibly done for older, simpler games (games such as the original DOOM, or even also the first 2 fallout games).
Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were both made to work on the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. Those had to pull data from DVD and/or hard drive often, so Bethesda made the game hold assets in the little bit of RAM that those systems had for a long as possible. When ported to PC, the games are still holding as much in RAM as they can till what appears to be a 1GB (ish) hard cap. And it seems the way they mapped their memory allocations can get unstable when you keep the buffer near full. When I played Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I was running an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ heavily overclocked with 4GB of RAM and an overclocked ATi Radeon X1950 Pro AGP graphics card, the games looked and ran beautifully, but they would crash after playing for awhile if I did not fast travel for long stretches, where as the PlayStation 3 could play for hours on end with no crashes. I guess as a quirk of porting to PC from the consoles, they did not create a memory leak, just a memory buffer overrun within the game. Makes a lot more sense as to why I have seen friends with lower end PCs at the time play perfectly fine for hours on end as well without crashes, the game did not get to exceed its own memory buffer.
Wasn't the ps3 version the worst version compared to the 360 version?
@@iseeu46 Yes, 360 is the "definitive" version of F:NV, DLC content was also affected negatively by the game's port onto PC/PS3. PC only supercedes the 360 version of the game with fan patches/mods.
TriangleCity has a series discussing cut content from the game, but as part of the series he discusses nearly every "famous" bug/glitch associated with the game that's tied to peculiarities (like cut content or rare one-off behavior scripts). As part of this, he details some of the biggest differences between the game versions, it's definitely worth checking out if you like background noise and want more video game trivia to clog your brain with :)
I found that ps3 was stablish till your save file got to big than it was full game over
New Vegas on the PS3 is infamous for freezing every 30 minutes or so the farther you are in the game since the devs didn’t know how to make the game run correctly with the PS3s split RAM and Fallout 3 had the same problem.
@@nonstopmaximum2141 Honestly from playing on the ps3 version for several years you could tell when the game would crash by watching how it loaded from door transitions.
If your game got choppy or somewhat slow you should've saved there and reset your console to flush the ram. This also tied in too the save file size when you've played through multiple dlc's. The longer you've played a save file the more often you needed to reset the console
Ive never really seen this topic covered before, its a really cool and interesting topic, and you covered it very well, I do hope this video gets recommended to a ton more people. You did a great job and you should be proud of this video.
Thanks! Mostly I'm hoping it reaches that one pair of ears that knows how to find that flag to make that mod...
"Fixing New Vegas" is one of those life-achievements I'd be happy to share!
@@speedingoffence I wish you luck then ^^
@@speedingoffence Nice the video got a bunch more views!
It only get unstable when u install mods tho
I never bothered with mods and never crashed
Fallout nv is unstable with mods
The fuck? This topic has been actively covered since the game launched, so much so that one of highest charting mods for it is the 4GB patcher that runs the game in a 64bit executable, therefore doubling the amount of available RAM.
I originally played this game in Xbox 360. There was a whole empty region of the map that would crash the game. I learned the boundaries of that crash area and walked around. I saved obsessively.
This game helped me immensely. I had just gotten my wisdom teeth out and was on pain meds. So my memories of the game are special and fuzzy.
If you ever regrow them and get wisdom teeth pulled again (somehow), I'd recommend Cruelty Squad. That was the game I played when dealing with the pain (I wasn't given pain meds besides to take Tylenol and ibuprofen). It enhanced the experience.
@@Bova-Fettthat’s crazy I got 4 removed and they loaded me up with pain meds like more than for a broken leg or kidney stone lol I was tutoring someone in math with a swollen face feeling great
@@Bova-Fett"😢 You are now addicted to ibuprofen"
@@Bova-Fett I'm glad I grew up during the beginning of the opiods, they got he high af for the first time in the 7th grade I think it was when they pulled them all. I'm deathly allergic to ibuprofen, naproxen and aspirin though as an anaphylaxis.
A Microsoft Kernal Engineer wrote a blog post entitled “A cache with a bad policy is another name for a memory leak”
FONV’s cache has a bad policy.
I like your comment. I think your assessment is spot on.
What I struggle with is the definition. I think it's a bit too subjective, and I prefer my definitions unambiguous.
That being said, I had to think about it for a bit, and I certainly wouldn't consider it 'wrong'. I think reasonable people could disagree on this.
Great video. It's really cool seeing the CZcams generation find these issues all over again.
You nailed it. 4GB Patch and a cell purging mod (Looks like Stewies is the one that works in 2023) will do a great job of resolving this specific issue. Using those will make FNV run for *much* longer.
Is there a cell purging mod for Fallout 3?
Also, whenever I've used the 4 GB Patch on a game, it made the .exe unrecogniseable and I had to revert. Don't suppose you know the cause/fix?
I planned on doing the 4GB Patch and New Vegas Reloaded (it has a custom memory allocation to hopefully avoid the memory crashes)
those modders use something like cell buffering, not sure the technical differences myself but i would wager that they could help you out. i see three of them on Nexus.
and for the 4gb patch, are you referring to 3 or NV? either way, you might need to elevate the mod loader you're using and/or the new .exe file to launch as Administrator. that's what worked for me using Vortex on NV just recently. shouldn't matter which mod loader though
@@MaddBadgerr
> It's really cool seeing the CZcams generation find these issues all over again.
What? In what other context is not making use of knowledge of the past helpful? Would you say something simila in a context of war? "It's good those kids learned that engaging is war is stupid, after having engaged in war."
as computers change, so does backwards compatibility. these games only get older, and new problems arise.
it's good to see people still interested in keeping these games running, so we kinda need new generations of people to do just that.
i think that's the point of what was said, anyway. no need to overanalyze the choice of words@@rabbitcreative
I often encountered this on Fallout 3 on the PS3. I found that it mostly occurred during combat in object rich environments so I would always pick up loot, loose trash and tin cans as I walked around and put then in a bin or sell them to a merchant. By removing all unneeded processing requirements the chance of game crash fell dramatically but never hit zero... Bethesda is always one glitch ahead of the players!
i play games to escape responsibilities like cleaning but it sounds like you were living out your tidy up fantasy in fallout
Every time I pick up an object, every other object around it starts slightly levitating... Oblivion, fallouts, Skyrim - all the same.
There has got to be some kind of metaphor here about players picking up Bethesda's trash
Bros out here tidying up the wasteland 🫡
So not only was New Vegas designed with fast travel required from a gameplay perspective, but from a technical perspective as well.
Makes a lot more sense why i would start to "feel" like i was going to crash. Because it would always happen in these locations. One thing I would also notice when a crash was imminent is that the audio would break for everything except the pipboy.
New Vegas crashes for a variety of reasons, most crashes are related to bad meshes/navmeshing. The memory stuff can be fixed by cell purging and using the 4gb patch. I think nvtf or Stewie's tweaks has the cell purging one
So I've heard, yes! I'm reading all this stuff, and it's great!
I’ve never been able to play FNV and believe me, Ive tried. Followed every step word for word with mods that are supposed to “fix” the issue. Never worked. Never been able to leave the starting zone, never held a weapon, talked to one person and the game constantly died.
@@aliasilver_636 follow the Vnv guide, I can confirm it 100% works
@@aliasilver_636 Speaking from experience sometimes you need to tweak the mods a little, I ended up having to dive into the stutter remover file to flip some toggles.that improved the smoothness at the.cost of stability.
@@aliasilver_636 You're not alone there.
There's something going on around the Helios one and the Repconn facility. Maybe a few less cache doors than there should be, maybe the sheer amount of trash around, maybe something entirely different. Although NPCs obviously make the game more volitile the more of them you have, areas with a lot of junk can act quite wildly. I think the physics engine was just a little too memory voracious for the time. I'm only speculating tho
Looked it up, and Fallout: New Vegas uses the Havoc Physics engine. But apparently, New Vegas had to be updated to a newer version (from Fallout 3) during development, which was stated as one of the biggest technical issues during development.
So, that could be what’s going on with those areas.
Not sure if it's related or not, but that area as well as Novac are where development was started, making them the oldest areas of the game.
From working with mods a bit, I have a hunch the issue with crashes around Helios One have to do with loading the junkyard behind Novac when moving in and out of its vicinity. It might back your idea that it’s the objects that cause the issue. That IS just a hunch on my part, though, not anything I’ve rigorously tested.
I actually had an issue where I physically could not enter RepConn, even with console commands, on a certain save file. I had to go on a different save file and load it in which, for whatever reason, allowed me an extra couple milliseconds to get into RepConn before it crashed which allowed for an autosave. I think this means that your character has something to do with it, and on a separate save file I was able to do RepConn just fine. This one specific save has been troubling me more than anything else.
I should add that the purpose of that autosave was so that I could actually load into RepConn so that I could maybe get it into RAM, making it load properly on the other save file (which worked!)
This is fascinating. I love it when people can learn technical things about how games work by just playing them. This feels like a Pannenkoek video for New Vegas. Awesome work dude.
This gives so much validation and context to so much of my frustration as a kid. Thank you for this information.
A 32-bit app on Windows is almost always limited to 2 GB (2,048 MB) of memory for both itself and any libraries (aka ".DLL files") it needs to run, and the memory taken up by those libraries is not shown in process manager. This was adequate at the time FNV was released, but in the intervening dozen plus years, the memory required by these libraries has grown quite a lot. On Windows 10, they take up nearly half of the memory available, which is why FNV crashes when it has reached about 1,000 MB, and needs to allocate more.
It is +/- 2GB that gives one 4GB to work with, and is why Win XP (32 bit OS) was limited to supporting 4GB RAM.
Yes, thank you, I was going to note this is why 64 bit OS and processors were pushed to hard. More RAM. LOL @@bradyelich2745
From my experience windows versions doesn't influence crashes
Especially how FNV were rushed out of the door and other vanilla Bethesda games ran without problems so far if problematic mods aren't installed
What an excellent idea for a video. As a hobbyist developer, I find stuff like this to be so fascinating.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
This is a really neat video about actually showing and explaining how both memory leaks and New Vegas work. What I've always found interesting is, for my part, even when loaded up with expansion mods, I've had New Vegas crash maybe twice in the several years I've been playing. Very interesting video, nice job!
I've always thought on this, but never got an answer as solid as your videos (plus some of the comments).
Great work!
I never really considered keeping task manager open while playing new vegas. I played with some mods that would cause crashing, this would’ve been nice to have up on my second monitor. I guess I’m used to the Xbox where I’m not really concerned about crashing and couldn’t monitor the ram if I wanted to.
i keep task manager open sometimes when my RAM or CPU usage spikes randomly to help with understanding why my computer is struggling even while just doing shit like using an internet browser, makes sense to use it when your PC is chugging while gaming too, even if it just helps you understand the functionality of the application you use
Never really experienced much crashing on Xbox tbh.
I tried to finish my most recent playthrough modless, as i hadn't picked up the game in a while, and almost did it until Dead Money. That DLC had so many area transition crashes i needed 4 mods just to make the game stable enough to keep going 😭
Still finished the game though 🥳
I don't understand why you don't just use the base finish of Viva New Vegas, it literally has MUST-HAVE mods to prevent crashes, issues, bugs and everything inbetween. Like I get running modless, but the exception to that rule is optimizations and actual improvements without changing the feel, look and gameplay of the game.
Performance, optimization and bug fixing mods are must, even for vanilla playthroughs.
Even with mods, most of the times had a DirectX/microsoft libraries crash at the "Puerta de Sol"
@@mrazbyte3150indeed, new vegas needs the important mods to truly be playable. for example, the nude female body mod makes the game finally be playable.
@@mrazbyte3150 it was more out of curiosity, I knew how unstable the game was but I just wanted to see how far I'd get. I did 40 hours at 40 fps 😆
Thank you for the explanation! I don't think I've ever seen this topic being covered, but it has been really nice to see an explanation, of new vegas' frequent crashes. Thank you very much!
There's probably a memory leak somewhere, but the crash does not appear to be associated with a memory leak, it might have something to do with a limited cache buffer size that doesn't get properly cleared at the right time. Either the cache buffer is allocated to before the free takes place, thus overflowing the buffer, (which may segfault, or it might intentionally crash) or something in the cache is wrongly freed as the buffer deallocator becomes more aggressive and then that wrongly freed memory is accessed, which probably creates a segfault.
Also a memory leak is real, basically how they work is that you allocate memory in the program (which then asks the OS for memory) but then you at some point lose reference access to that memory in the program (the OS still knows that memory is in use, but because the program did not tell the OS that the specific memory block should be freed, it does not consider freeing it until the program is shutdown, where the OS will terminate all the memory related to the program) as a result the memory is leaked, its freely existing for the entirety of the program and the program has no way to free it because it has basically forgotten that it allocated that memory, you want a basic example of how to do this in C++, here is an example
#include
int main() {
{
int* i = new int(0); // We allocate an integer whose value is 0 into heap memory
std::cout
Judging by the comments here, this is the sort of crowd that'll dig an answer with an example!
Yep, that's how I learned it as well. Imagine if New Vegas had more dev time, I wonder what that world looks like...
It's too bad the answer describing memory overallocation as a memory leak is the one with 2.2k likes and this one only has 35. Memory overallocation is booking 201 tickets for a 200 seat airplane, memory leak is landing at the destination with only 199 passengers.
Damn this is eye opening. I wonder if this has anything related to starfield crashing all the time. Just opening the pause menu does it a lot.
I wouldn’t be surprised, since they still use the same garbage outdated game engine -_- toddler howie doesn’t like change.
Well, in theory a 64-bit program should be able to handle, literally, 16 million terabytes of RAM.
That being said, in theory, a 32-bit program should be able to handle 4GB, and it takes a patch to make New Vegas do that, so who knows?
@@SqualidsargeStudios The Creation Engine is basically just a Fork of the Gamebryo Engine. So down in it's core you're playing the same Engine that once ran Morrowind, only with much more parts, patches and fixes. And i guess it shows?
@@TheMygoran And Source 2 is a fork of Source which is a fork of GoldSrc which is a fork of id Tech 2 which is a fork of id Tech 1 which is a fork of the Wolfenstein 3D engine. CS2 runs like a dream with zero crashes and consistent 120+ FPS regardless. It's more about bad optimization when it comes to Starfield.
@@Mate_Antal_Zoltan IdTech2 is not a fork of IdTech1. Carmack wrote it from scratch with fundamentally different rendering processes in mind.
I really love how hands-on this demonstration is Thanks man
I absolutely love this type of video. A deep dive on a niche game from my childhood. Great work.
More to come!
Great video, hope to see more content like this in the future. Take care!!
I know that when I played new Vegas on the ps3 I had to save a lot because of the frequent crashing, I also knew the signs, it would begin to stutter in seemingly open parts of the game or have a long time between load screen to in game time.
You know the PS3 had 256MB of RAM?
It's impressive it could even boot games like this.
@@speedingoffence well it was made on disc for the ps3 so idk, It may have been optimized for it, but it did play nice for a good few hours before it would crash. Also remember the fun bugs that you could do with the ammo types and different weapons like using mini nukes with the laser designator
@@Nebsgame It was great fun.
Same here with the ps3, and it would always be red rock that does it. Made me not enjoy talking to the misguided biker gang and having to do the save then exit to relaunch combo.
I also have it on PS3, a random crash set me back enough to annoy me, I save constantly now, as I do with fallout 3 on my laptop
It's never been 2 GB usable. It's ~1.5 GB. ~512MB is reserved for system memory addresses (a part of your soundcard/network card being addressable in RAM and other essential stuff the Windows OS needs to store for the kernel and drivers to function). There's also a thing called Aperture size. It was more important with AGP cards and still today with embedded videocards. Embedded cards have no VRAM, so they use your RAM. So whatever the aperture size is, is the MB of RAM that is reserved for videocard use and not available for a program. And usually, you can configure that aperture size in your BIOS.
As for the issue, it looks like there's a bug/oversight in the RAM management for the game. I know that sounds obvious but allow me to elaborate. It "could" be a bug that prevents zones from being evicted from RAM (lingering when they should be free). But I'm thinking there's probably a limit based on RAM size, and the game was never designed/tested with 2 GB or >2GB of RAM (as consoles have far far less than that). So instead of knowing "I have 1 GB of RAM never use more than that" it sees "4 GB of RAM" and has no hardcoded concept of the Windows limit of ~1.5 GB and lets it rise past 1.5 GB because it's trying to limit it at 4 GB.
Because if it's simply storing too much stuff and never evicting it, then it should also be blowing up on Xbox 360 and PS3s all the time--presuming of course that the bug is in all three versions and not just the PC version.
This is good stuff! If I make a followup, would you like a mention?
Also, there was an engine conversion of some sort between versions. Different version of the Havoc engine. That's probably the distinction.
Ha, having a condition to purge the oldest area when near "memory limit" and reading that "memory limit" as whatever PC has (Installed GB - Used Gb), not as whatever is really available (2GB - Used GB). This seems plausible! Exactly THE mistake which could be made and not be detected while using PC/console with 2GB RAM for testing =D
And this is not a "memory leak" per se... If the game was forgetting to purge... But it does not forget, it just has the condition set wrong... NIce... OR maybe it is a condition based not on memory, but number of areas (cells as they call it in the Editor) loaded?
@@sergiomorozov I don't think it's cells. I showed a regular house causing the usage to drop about 40MB when I got back from Primm.
im amazed how practical and genuine you came to the conclusion, great way of documenting
That's very nice of you to say!
This was a very well-made video! It was really enjoyable, despite me having no background knowledge on the topic!
When you enter Camp McCarran you're leaving the Mojave worldspace and entering the McCarran one. I think what happens is that the game only keeps the cells belonging to one worldspace buffered at any given time, alongside the last few visited interior cells. Not sure whether changing worldspaces *also* purges interior cells, though.
You can also manually purge the cell buffer with the pcb console command.
Would you please watch the fkn video before commenting
@@ssgoko88 If he hadn't watched the video, he wouldn't have known to reference Camp McCarran in his post. But good sleuthing there, Sherlock.
@@ssgoko88 What are you getting angry about? The guy in the video never mentioned worldspaces, but he went through three of them: the mojave, mccarran, and the strip. All three of them reset the memory of the game. OP was just elaborating.
@@ssgoko88 What are you on, buddy? The OP explains why places like McCarran and the Strip clean the memory, which isn't explained in the video but is established
@@ssgoko88 *Take your meds.*
The game is held in worldspaces, and interact between one-another in specific ways. It's why if you throw a grenade over the strip wall nothing happens, nobody is inside that area and it's located in an entirely different place to help the issue of memory management. When you enter a new worldspace the game clears the previous one and also does not preload it, which is why going to McCarren always takes a bit longer.
*Take your meds next time before commenting.*
I think I can explain why that one instance cleared the cache.
In the Oblivion/Fallout3/NV engine, the game is defined by interior and exterior world spaces (basically, interior spaces get static lighting - no day/night - and do not use terrain generation). For the exterior world space, the world is divided into "cells". As the player moves from cell to cell, it buffers the cells adjacent to the player's direction of movement.
When a new exterior world space is loaded that is not adjacent to the previous exterior world space, it will clear the cache. So basically: When fast traveling or moving into an entirely new "world".
I'm sure other mods handle cache clearing far more competently, but in short, this method is not like something that's just attached to the door that says "clear the cache here!", instead it's more a coincidental function that happens because the place you loaded happened to be an exterior cell in a new "world", which forced the cache clear function. In order to make this a mod, every single interior space would need to be transferred to an exterior world space, which is easier said than done.
Indeed. I didn't notice until after I'd edited this that the strip itself clears the cache, you can see it when I walk out of the casino at the end.
You've got a pleasant way of speaking, and I learned a lot from this vid. Hope you make more like it!
You say you are not tech savvy but you sure understood this and explained it very well!
Thank you!
I've always thought that it was maybe a problem with my rig or that I needed to fix something I wasn't aware about. It is most definitely interesting to see how the Devs tried to overcome the shortcomings of technology in the past and how that affects the way it's played today. Hopefully the modding community will keep going at it in their efforts to polish the technical aspects of this game, even though there's only so much you can do with the engine's limitations.
I'd say it's a shame that Bethesda isn't putting any real effort on modernizing one of the best game that was ever released that has their name on it. I really wish they'd put more attention on what Capcom did with Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 and started taking notes.
Really interesting watch!
I used to play this on 360 back in the day and it got to the point where the game would consistently crash every 15-20 minutes. The PC version thankfully has some mods that fix the problem.
I can't even imagine trying to play this on console, yeesh.
I feel like I've learned something new about an old friend that I've known for most of my life. Great video!
Thank you for explaining this in a simple way. I'm 30 years old, and still learning something new every day
Software dev here and I can say a few things about memory leaks. 1) They are real, 2) They are usually not the problem 3) This is not one.
--- what is a memory leak? ---
Memory leaks are real. They are also not very common in todays software landscape. When writing in low level languages, you have to allocate and free memory manually. If you want to store something you have to manually say "Hey computer, I need 32 bits for this integer I want to store" and then you do some stuff with that integer and when you no longer care abou the integer you say "hey, I'm done with that integer, so you can mark that memory as available now."
A memory leak happens when you have some function somewhere that reserves memory, but doesn't free it. Now, every time a task is completed, all the information about *how* the task was completed is typically discarded. This includes the addresses of the memory it used. So if a function doesn't free it's memory before finishing, you will never be able to recover that memory until the program restarts. This is why it's called a leak. Memory that "leaks" this way is essentially unrecoverable.
Most functions don't need to allocate much memory. But if a function has 1 byte it forgets to free, and is called 60 times per second, you will be bleeding 60 bytes per second. This means you will eventually have half a gigabyte of memory that you've essentially lost track of.
This is how you identify a memory leak. A memory leak's calling card is that the applications memory usage should grow over time without bound. If you leave a game running for 2 days straight and when you come back it's using 100% of your memory and lagging out, you may have a memory leak.
--- Why is it no longer a problem ---
Because allocating and freeing memory is actually somewhat technical and fairly easy to mess up, this used to be a huge problem and in the early days this was a fairly common type of bug. But not anymore. Most software today is written in higher level languages that do "automatic garbage collection." This means they automatically free memory.
So even though they used to be a common problem, they aren't any more. But they still take the heat and are one of those terms that get thrown around a lot by people who don't really know what it means.
--- why is this not a memory leak? ---
Anyway, this isn't a memory leak because this isn't memory growing without bound. It knows all the areas that are loaded and that memory is able to be freed as it is deemed necessary. It's just not programmed with the foresight to see it's going to run out of space.
Great answer! I like 'automatic garbage collection'.
I don't know about the game having memory leaks but the worst place in the game is Novac because rather randomly when you leave the store in novac your save file can be corrupted so it's good practice to have more than 1 save file for your character when playing the game and to save regularly so that if your save file becomes corrupt you won't have to reload from 5 or 6 hours earlier and forgot where you were and what you were doing at that point in order to get back on track
Its definitely likely to crash there going back out when you've been playing for a reasonable time..I tend to reset the game if I've been playing for a while and need to go there..also when I've been repeating the vender restock glitch numerous times on the Wednesday and Sunday (buying ammo in large quantities) quick save then exist to main menu then back in again..I've noticed though it has a chance of crashing regardless with Elijah's shack related to vault 34 quest (I could make you care)
If you didn't do this, are you really playing a Bethesda game?
Yes I know Obsidian developed this but still, using the same engine as Fallout 3
For some reason, that one travelling merchant and their guard never delete their gooified corpses
Guess the fact that Novac is one of the first created locations explains both of those problems
@theonemasterwarhero My hunch (and it is just a hunch) is that the objects in the Novac junkyard are the proximate cause of crashes. That’s from working with mods and also noticing that crashes happen relatively often when moving around Helios One in the direction of Novac.
@@Thy_Boss Definitely sounds possible..I've never touched any of the scrap in the junkyard..only ever just interacted with Gibson in regards to repconn and getting a brain for Rex...and only ever had her appear literally on the spot (once) hostile when coming outside from helios one into the solar panel grounds. (was pretty hilarious in a wtf kind of way)
This is pretty interesting. Thank you. Subscribed 👍
Very cool video, enjoyed learning more about my favorite game!
From what I can recall from my ps3 gameplay of NV, is that in the later game, mc carran became a bit of a forbidden zone to me. The game would've been running okay, all around the wasteland and other interiors. Once I entered mc carran, it would take ages to load and once loaded in became very slow, it usually went frame by frame. One time I just gave up on going in there so I've managed to literally "frame" my way out of there. Even the shutter door option to exit took a while to load up and took as spam of hitting X to activate. Than the wasteland would load up and everything returned back to normal.
Fast travelling to nearby locations can cause crashes as the game might not be able to unload the ram. Also crashes occur when the ram is loaded up (travelled some distance on foot) and you enter a purge location or fast travel, there is a slight spike in usage just before it unloads, causing a crash. At least I think this is whats happening. Corrupt saves can often be loaded by loading another working save first then loading the corrupted save.
This explains to many of the crashes I have encountered in my playthrough. The main ones I can think of specifically are when I entered Gamora and when I left the Westside slums. those must have tipped the ram limit just far enough above what the game can handle.
That's really cool.
Nice. A great explanation. Plain and simple.
I've played New Vegas for thousands of hours. It's without a doubt my absolute favorite game. But I never knew the exact issue behind its constant crashes, even though I've kinda got a feeling for the timing of these crashes. That video gave me much needed intel, that's for sure. Thank you.
I just use a shit ton of mods that are purposely designed to make it incredibly stable for modding. But this is honestly interesting to think about, something I didn't know I wanted to know about.
32-bit applications should be able to allocate somewhere around 2~4 gigs. I think a good portion of NV's memory is paged to the hard drive by the OS when it's not used. The real number of memory it's using (or "pages") is probably higher than 1.1 gigs
I really, really enjoyed this video. Nice job, dude.
This made it make sense, I knew it was cause of loading tiles but understanding what purges it is going to be really helpful.
I stumbled upon it while capturing video on a previous not-so-robust rig, where having the task manager open was a normal thing!
The game is supposed to be able to handle 2gb but not always the case. There is a mod that allows 4gb, careful tho there is two versions that are deprecated. I think there is also a mod that helps with random crashes caused by memory issues. I think its by stewai is the modder. Cant remember exactly.
32-bit stuff is supposed to go up to 4GB, but that has to include VRAM (I'm pretty sure) and a couple other system functions related to the game.
I was using the 4GB one when I got it up to 1.35GB, but I was also a handful of texture packs, which would eat up that VRAM allocation.
@@speedingoffence huh
@@stinkygoat2686vram is the memory of the GPU, modern high end have around 8-12gbs of vram
@@fuzzyhair321they know that
@@fuzzyhair321 That doesn't matter, the game can't use more than 4GB of RAM and VRAM _combined._ It's the game's limit, not your hardware's. The memory addresses are stored in 32bit unsigned integers, so the number of bytes the game uses cannot exceed 4,294,967,295.
This might be the case too for Fallout 3 as well. I recently fixed my install of that game and it ran so smoothly but I haven't encountered a crash yet with that fresh install. I was hoping for a mod or something to make it more stable but research proved negative and then this vid magically appeared in my recommended and might just explain the problem.
So maybe, if Fast Travel resets the cache a Tactical Fast Travel might help with some of the crashing by lowering the cache every so often combined with turning the game on and off in bigger areas
Actually I was looking to play fallout 3 on pc. Got any mod suggestions to make the game more stable ?
@@AltDelete_52 Well first things first get it on GOG its generally more stable. I mostly play Vanilla otherwise I did explore with some mods but they tended to be more trouble for the stability. I still want to try and get unique textures on the unique gear to work but playing vanilla keeps it the most stable
Tale of Two Wastelands will optimize F3 & FNV, allow you to switch from one to the other, and allow you to use many FNV mods in F3. That's why the modding community for F3 seems totally dead.
@@AltDelete_52TTW if you have both 3 & NV. Gamer Poets has a good guide.
I heard somewhere that this mod messes with the balancing. Is that true ?
Wow! Thanks! Subbed. Fascinating as heck.
Amazing video! Legendary work
Memory leak is 100% real in programs i have watched memory usage gradually rise for no conceivable reason until a game has crash from no memory. (I cant remember game) In this case idk if its technically a leak.
This explains why older games basically require you to get off for a little bit then log back in to give the pc a break. Though now most people have fairly decent rigs. With much greater management of cooling and memory
Modern rig doesn't help with this game tho. Even if you have 128 GB of RAM, the game can only use up to 2 GB as it is a 32-bit app.
Also, it appears that the game has an internal limit, which lowers the 2 GB farther to around 1GB, which I assume was made for consoles but remains in the PC version
Excellent detective work, this explains a lot!
Ah fantastic work explaining it. I've always had trouble explaining what a memory leak is to folks. Now I can just show them this.
I've always kind of wondered why this happens, thanks. My question is, is the game choosing to crash intentionally to avoid hurting a PC with minimum system requirements? Could the soft cap be raised by a mod to like three times the threshold so there would never be a risk of crash? Or is it by some fault of the computer that this limit is there in the first place/ the pc makes the game crash?
I know my game always risked a crash when fast traveling in Big MT.
It's a 32-bit thing. There's a hard cap to how much RAM a 32-bit program can use. It's about 4GB, all in, including VRAM. There's technically a maximum for 64-bit programs (the current standard) as well, but it's 16 million terabytes, so we're probably good for a few more years before that becomes a problem.
Someone wrote a 64-bit patch for Skyrim about 8 years back, but Bethesda patched the game so that it won't work anymore. They never said why. I remember having Skyrim use 33GB of RAM at one point, it was glorious.
@@speedingoffence Ah. So the game needs the Open Morrowind treatment to be a 64 bit game and not just a mod that runs a script, probably? Now I think I understand quite a bit more about why Open Morrowind exists.
@@Kryptnyt Actually, I don't think any one instance will trip the cap. If it purged at every instance change, I think it'd be fine. And that purge is in there, written into the McCarren gate.
That being said, a 64-bit crack would be ABSOLUTELY AWESOME because we could start running 8k texture packs and... Man, the sky is the limit!
@@speedingoffence
Oh my god... Bethesda's "patch" made it so that it won't work anymore???
I HATE Bethesda EVEN MORE now...
@@HattaTHEZulZILLA86 I KNOW! Sure, maybe we didn't NEED 8k textures on raindrops, and running 4 simultaneous ENBs was kinda redundant, but dammit it was sure great fun when we could!
I once killed Darth Vader and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by conjuring an army of Corgis and I don't see why that was a bad thing!
Follow the Viva New Vegas modding guide, it includes all the most important crash and memory fixes. I can't explain the technicals but even when heavily modded my New Vegas never crashes.
Same here, was about to comment this. I later on installed a heavy mod list on top of it but yet this is the most stable New Vegas has ever been
I got trough the intro and character creation flawllessly. Did the learning the basics and went back to talk to Trudy and then the crashes started without me going in or out of the houses or leaving Good Springs. I just casually stroll to any direction for a bit and just just dies without slowling down or distorting the audio as if there was a set time limit for it to crash.
Very concise video, love it. Will know now to reload my game upon entering crash happy areas.
Hey, thanks!
Who the hell claims memory leaks aren't real things? It's a Bethesda game, they're practically baked into the design document.
downtown boston in fallout 4 being literal proof of memory leak:
Nah the real answer is because the game is built on a foundation that was created by bethesda, and this is just what happens to everything Todd touches. Scientists have been trying to explain it for years but haven't gotten anywhere yet.
Great video, great comments. Thank you
Im literally going through this game for the first time now, so this is interesting to learn about. Another interesting thing I noticed is that I get lots of these crashes on Windows but ive only had a couple when playing on Linux (Steam Deck)
I looked up Memory Leak on Wikipedia once, and it said what it was, and then said, "not to be confused with a memory leek, a vegetable that remembers things."
Interesting. Definitely shed some light on the topic for me.
You're a hero for making these videos. I knew for a fact that the game itself is simply not very stable, but I can never just prove it.
I'm also well aware that mod conflicts can obviously cause crashes, but again, I absolutely knew the game engine is just not very stable because of how it handles many various things. Thank you very, very much for making these videos to tackle perhaps one of the most important overarching topics regarding Fallout New Vegas.
Wow that was actually informative! NV is a crash-heavy game for me without some mods added, but I still love it
wonderful video, proud to be your 600th subscriber
Glad to have you! This has been a ride!
never thought to keep an eye on the RAM like that. Although when your game crashed it looked like an instant crash-to-desktop, which isn't what I mostly get from my New Vegas crashes. Mine usually freezes up on loading screens and needs to be force quit through Task Manager. Learned a while back to always make sure Task Manager is open on the other screen whenever I launch New Vegas, because otherwise I'd have to navigate task manager with Tab and the arrow keys, only able to see what I'm working with by peeking through the Alt+Tab window. I became pretty good at that back in the day.
this is such a great video. thank you for this.
I love that people are still making content for and about New Vegas
Very great video, Informative and compact.
Thank you. I try to get right to the point.
Thank you for making this! Yes this has been solved with mods. At the start of the Viva New Vegas guide they explain how to make the game utilise more RAM on your computer, which essentially solves the crashes.
There are many mods that handle this exact issue. I'd recommend checking out the Viva New Vegas guide. You don't have to use everything in it but the bug fixes section of the guide addresses pretty much all of these issues. Even on a slower SATA3 SSD from 10 years ago, I get near instant load times to the point where I don't even see the loading screen.
This is good to know, if I can't find any mod patches I'll keep this in mind next time I play
Thank you so much this might be able to help he run the game in the future, I knew there was some weird techromancy going on with this game I just didn’t know what it was
I got used to New Vegas crashing, it just became part of the experience for me in a way. Playing games of this period I acknowledge such issues are sadly a given. I give you Custom Zombies on World At War.
You've display why it happens in NV at a level I never knew or appreciated the full technical details for. Thank you😊
Strangely enough even back on my pos pc I never crashed with waw custom zombies. I would occasionally get a frame drop but never enough to kill me or crash the game
In 2012 beat the game twice with crashes galore.
In 2018 i managed to make the game relatively crash free but put off playing it after helping the boomers
But in 2020 and 2023 it became harder
I guess it's the mods...
All instances of playing FNV i never play vanilla
Haha dude I love your relaxed communication, greatful that we all have that shared love for New Vegas and its funky duct taped kinks and workarounds, like an old car
Thank you!
i was going to start a tale of two wastelands playthrough after i see family for thanksgiving, bless you for this
Doing the lords work. Thank you.
Personally, my game has never crashed in Gomorrah. What gets me is fast traveling to the Strip gate and pretty much anything in Old World Blues. What a magical game.
A super useful video, thank you !
For me, this makes sense as to why ive mostly gotten my crashes going into freeside, the strip, mcarran, and other large world spaces. Its weird though, sometimes my game will refuse to let me go into the atomic wrangler ot the king school too.
This is awesome to see. Yeah, there's a reason two of the needed mods to run the game smoothly are the 4 GB patch and a cell purging mod.
i just started another playthrough (been playing probably every 2 years since it came out) and i find that the modding scene only gets better and better at making the game is super steady, rarely a crash with my usual 55 mods installed.
Quick saving before attempting to load a new area seems to work for clearing the cache. It does still crash if you're not careful but it was a workaround that let me finish the game without resorting to mods.
there was a command prompt i used back in the day to assign more ram to various games that needed it due to memory leaks.
supreme commander and fallout3 were the two games that needed it.
I've noticed when audio begins to break or delay, that's when a crash is incoming if I don't stop playing to let the game catch up.
This explains why some people have far more crashes than others! I've been playing this game for 13 years since release and it has rarely ever crashed for me.
I started playing new vegas for the first time recently, it was my first bethesda game so seeing all the crashes really made me understand...
This helped explain why it crashed a ton until I got the 4gb patch
For me it's Freeside. Doing the quests for The Kings/Followers/Atomic Wrangler all while having to go in and out of the strip is a fast way to go back to your desktop abruptly.