Why does Fallout 1 use over a gig of ram?

agris

agris

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
I never noticed this before, and I can't really believe it's right, but, when I'm running fallout and hit ctl-alt-del and look at processes, it reports falloutw.exe using 1,090,860 K of memory, thats 1065 MB of ram to run a game that I used to play on a pentium 2. I'm using the updated 1.31 version of the game with the NPC mod and was wondering if anyone else had run into fallout using obscene amounts of ram? Maybe my computer is setup in a way the game just hates. I'm using Win95 Compatability mode and leaving my color and desktop resolution normal (1280x32bit). I haven't disabled my ati 800's hardware acceleration.

If it helpts, I'm using an opteron 165 with all the dualcore amd/windows patches, 4 banks of identical 512 sticks of ram running at ddr370, a 512mb page on the OS drive and 1500mb page on second drive.

OH, and I was having the really slow fade out problem that I had read about, but what fixed it for me was to just turn off winamp. It could be loaded and not playing music, and it would give me these horribly long fade outs EVERY time, and closing winamp fixed it. The game will stutter sometimes still though, I just really don't want to have to disable my video card to get fallout to run normal.
 
agris said:
I never noticed this before, and I can't really believe it's right, but, when I'm running fallout and hit ctl-alt-del and look at processes, it reports falloutw.exe using 1,090,860 K of memory, thats 1065 MB of ram to run a game that I used to play on a pentium 2. I'm using the updated 1.31 version of the game with the NPC mod and was wondering if anyone else had run into fallout using obscene amounts of ram? Maybe my computer is setup in a way the game just hates. I'm using Win95 Compatability mode and leaving my color and desktop resolution normal (1280x32bit). I haven't disabled my ati 800's hardware acceleration.
Click to expand...
Which means you're posting *in the wrong place*.
Moving to modding.
Also, 1 gig of ram is not normal.

agris said:
If it helpts, I'm using an opteron 165 with all the dualcore amd/windows patches, 4 banks of identical 512 sticks of ram running at ddr370, a 512mb page on the OS drive and 1500mb page on second drive.

OH, and I was having the really slow fade out problem that I had read about, but what fixed it for me was to just turn off winamp. It could be loaded and not playing music, and it would give me these horribly long fade outs EVERY time, and closing winamp fixed it. The game will stutter sometimes still though, I just really don't want to have to disable my video card to get fallout to run normal.
Click to expand...
You could try disabling hardware acceleration in Directx.
 
I doubt very much that the mod has anything to do with this.

Sounds like a memory leak which happens in windows all the time, normally its a currupted file that causes those memory explosions. Does it keep going up or get to that point and then stay there? It's quite likely caused by an application designed for Win95 running in WinXP (just be happy it runs at all).
If the game works dont worry about it, if you are really worried about it you could always reinstall Win95/98... into a Virtual Machine (yaa)

Also if you're running a game turn off any other crap running in the background (like winamp, msn, virus scanners, Outlook), leave the computer ti one the once application will increase performance.

Like I said before you could always run Fallout in a VMware virtual machine, do a search on these forums for VMware and you should find a tutorial I wrote.
 
Sander said:
Which means you're posting *in the wrong place*.
Moving to modding.
Also, 1 gig of ram is not normal.

You could try disabling hardware acceleration in Directx.
Click to expand...

One gig of ram isn't normal? Well, since you didn't elaborate: that was the entire point of the post; why would fallout, a game that normally use much less memory, 'bloat' up like that. Unless you mean to say that my machine has 1 gig which isn't normal... which isn't the case anyway. It has 2.

It seemed like it could go in either forum. shrug.

Wild_qwerty,

Thanks, I'll check out VMware. Wonder if it'll run better or worse.. what's your experience?
 
VMware works fine, the game goes a little slower (but that can be a good thing, as no slow down patch is required), you can also run the VM in a window.

But like I say unless the memory leak is stopping the game from running I wouldnt worry about it, it is kind of *normal* for processes to go rouge in Windows (considering that FO was designed to run in a Win9x environment and not a Win NT based one like XP)
 
It seems that the culprit was the fallout 1.2 falloutw.exe.

Every time I ran it, Fallout would load taking up a gig of ram. I did all the patching sequences up to and including 1.31 and then used the 1.1 exe and now I don't have the bloat. There is still a leak, as the process starts at about 20mb of memory and after a few hours grows to about 70mb, but thats not making it slow down like before.

I wonder what's in the 1.2 exe that made the memory leak so much more pronounced.
 
Some old games just tries to use all available ram.

Or it can be a cause of bad memory management.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top