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
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
At the start of the game, I walked up the road a bit, and tried to fast travel back to Goodsprings, but it kept crashing. The solution was to fast travel while standing instead of crouching. So damn weird.
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 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.
Memory leak is one thing, memory fragmentation is another: when the game wants to allocate, say, 100 meg chunk but all the freeing and allocating has turned the heap into swiss cheese, it can't find a continuous 100 meg chunk, allocation fails, and the game crashes. This used to be a thing in low memory environments (640k is enough for everybody etc), but we're hitting the same issue with 32 bit apps now.
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.
I would say this is NOT a memory leak. Memory leak means you've lost the pointer/reference to the memory and can't free it or access it anymore. But as you've said in the video, fast traveling would have freed that memory. Thus it's just that excessive memory usage for the 32bit platform, not a memory leak.
Essentially, Fallout has a bucket. When the game needs memory for something, it fills the bucket with water. When it no longer needs the memory, then that bucket is drained. The bucket is also a finite size. A memory leak happens when that last step isn't performed and the game crashes when the bucket overflows onto the nice carpet below it.
Best workaround I've found online. 1. Save a File at Doc's house before using the VIGOR. 2. If your game crashes load the Doc File. 3. Immediately load from Docs house into your most recent save. It's worked almost everytime. Considering I've lost countless saves even with the 4GB patch or NVSE modded in.
The 4GB RAM Patch works well in alleviating the crashes in my experience. There are a lot of mods out there which also help with stability and (some of) the best I've used are lStewieAl's Tweaks, New Vegas Tick Fix and New Vegas Heap Replacer. This is nowhere near a comprehensive list and if you are a first-time modder, try to not download anything big such as texture replacers and only add mods one at a time as if you don't, then you're going to be having a hard time when something breaks. As for memory leaks: Oh, they do exist! They effectively use RAM but never clear said RAM for use later on once the game is done with it, which is why when you go through many instance gates in perpetuity, the game will eventually run out of RAM and cause it to crash. It all comes down to when, not if, the game will crash unless you reboot the game every say 30 minutes or so. It's a tedious issue that I believe Oblivion suffers from as well. Heck, even the original Skyrim had this issue as it was a 32Bit game engine whereas the newer iterations are 64Bit which is a darn Godsend! :D I'm also not sure if this is an accurate list as it can, and will, change with time but for now, this is a good selection of mods to avoid including some even I have used myself like Project Nevada and Electro-City: vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/avoid-mods.html
I wouldn't call this a memory leak, just an inconsistent memory manager. it makes sense to keep a couple of cells in memory, so if the player decides to go back they don't have to sit through a long loading screen. it's just bad that the game doesn't seem to know how big each cell is, otherwise it could just clear old cells if it's about to hit the ram limit.
there are some... misunderstandings here the game world's outdoor spaces are "worldspaces" divided into grid cells. each interior is just one single cell existing outside of any grid (i.e. same basic data structure and behaviors as an exterior cell) the reason camp mccarran would appear to "clear memory" is because it's a separate worldspace, so the game can unload the main vegas worldspace. in general, any outdoor space that shares the LOD of the main vegas space but not its actual content will be its own worldspace; they share LOD via a parent/child relationship. for a comparison, each of DC's segmented areas in FO3 was its own worldspace separate from the main capital wasteland, as could be seen with out-of-bounds glitches looks like interiors are handled similarly to skyrim: there's a limited number of recently loaded interiors that the game will keep loaded (but stop actively simulating) after you leave them. it should dump the least recently loaded interiors as you load more of them, and i _expect_ it would do this entirely unrelated to what worldspaces you load and how. id be surprised if walking into camp mccarran's gate reliably cleared the interior cell buffer for example, though entering the interior of the building inside of that could bump another interior out of the buffer if the game is just going by number of interiors and not the total memory an interior would consume (which _would_ be kinda difficult) then that cache might just be too large
I appreciate you sharing your knowledge, but a lot of comments here don’t quite get the context of the “are memory leaks real” question asked in the video. The person behind this channel knows that there is such a thing as a memory leak in general. The video is addressing the online debate among people playing _New Vegas_ about whether the game’s most frequent cause of crashes is memory leaks in that specific application, or whether they’re caused by other issues. It’s not a debate as to whether memory leaks are a phenomenon in general; the video isn’t positing a conspiracy theory where Big Coder has hoaxed us all into believing in the fiction of memory leaks.
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
I want to see what the task manager looks like in dead money, because even with mods that reduce crashing in the vanilla game to once or twice per playthrough, its guaranteed to crash all the time when playing dead money and only dead money
New Vegas was designed to run with little ram, that means it crashes a lot. The 4GB patch usually fixes most crashing unless you have a billion mods which tbf we all do. Honestly Bethesda or whoever should just update the game with a hotfix that natively adds the patch, but they won't do that.
What's interesting is, while NV definitely does have leaks, what I show here is actually not one of them. The game IS clearing the cache, it's just doing it poorly.
Memory leaks are just when an application fails to release memory it is no longer using. Whether memory is "in-use" or not is really up to the application. High memory usage, in and of itself is not an issue yet. It only becomes an issue when an application is requesting for memory that the OS can no longer provide. This can happen in a few ways. One is that there simply isn't enough physical memory, but this should be rare as the OS is smart enough to temporarily offload memory from other applications to your hard disk so that your main application can get more memory, and then restore it when the other application becomes active again (the slower your hard disk, the more noticeable this is, as it may lag as it does this). What's more likely is that, as the application requests and releases memory over time, memory fragmentation becomes a real issue. Memory fragmentation happens when there is technically enough free memory to be requested/allocated, but not as a single block, which is how memory is generally allocated. This happens when you release smaller blocks of memory and request larger blocks of memory later. So while all the small pockets of memory that are available might add up to more than what an application requests, the OS will not allow that memory to be collected (or defragment) to be doled out in a single large block, which makes that request for memory fail. Once a memory request fails, most applications will crash on the spot unless they accounted for this and free up larger chunks of memory and try again, though this is not guaranteed to address the issue. As an example, let's say I had 10MB of memory. I request 3 2MB blocks of memory. I do what I need to do and release one of the blocks. Depending on which block that was (and my application is not going to know how the OS gives you that memory or where in physical memory it's from), my next request for a 5MB block of memory might succeed or it might fail, because there is no contiguous 5 MB of memory available to me, even though, technically, there should be a total of 6MB of memory available.
If you have a low end computer and play Remnant 2 you will find out right quick that memory leaks are real. It doesn't crash it just lowers your FPS over time until it's a perma slideshow until you reopen the game.
Here's my take on the whole memory leak thing. Neckbeards will say "it's not a real thing" because to them, it's not specific enough to be a useful term, as it's really an umbrella term for a whole bunch of different situations that could cause the symptom so very well described by @StarkeRealm below. That said, to the average person, who just wants to know why their computer isn't working and what in general is causing it, it's perfectly fine IMO.
Obsidian only had 18 months to finish the game. It would have been more stable if Obsidian had 2 years (24 months) instead. The game was rushed and yet Obsidian still managed to make a game that is still being played today. This is the GOAT.
This is a problem with the engine, Starfield even has the issue. One of the reasons is because all those loose items you can pick up or drop the location of where that item is has to be tracked so if you drop a pile of shotguns on the strip they will sit there. The other thing is auto save and the more you interact with loose objects in the world the bigger the save file will become. You can play New Vegas with no crashes if you turn on Autosave and have limited interaction with loose objects in the world. The fastest way to crash New Vegas or any game on the Source engines is to take demolition and just go crazy your game will become unplayable at some point.
After playing New Vegas again and revisiting this vid; Inventory items are counted towards the total RAM usage. I have tried playing the game with barely anything in my inventory, and it is fairly stable. And compared that, to having a metric ton of ammo in my inventory. It takes a hell of a lot of tries to even get into the McCaren terminal. And even walking into the Gomorrah, crashes 100% of the time. So yeah, it's something that you really gotta watch out for.
@@speedingoffence, Well, ammo on anything less than 'hardcore mode' is weightless; So it's an easy item to test with, while still being able to move around. Plus that is probably the number 1 cause of crashes; Seeing as how you really need a lot of ammo to deal with the 'bullet sponge' enemies. So everyone, I mean everyone, would seemingly stockpile it, whenever, and wherever, they can.
Theoretically, a 32-bit application is limited to a 4GB address space. In practice, windows limits 32-bit programs to 2GB. If the "large address aware" flag is enabled on the executable, windows will allow it to use more. I forget exactly how much more. In any case, it is odd to me that New Vegas seems to have a cap at around 1GB, as this doesn't line up with the known limits. They probably did some weird stuff with their memory management.
What is evidence is the 4gb unlocker mod, which allows the game to act like it’s x64 bit or something. It helped me avoid many crashes, but it’s very apparent when I re-install the game without this mod. Typically my game of New Vegas does not exceed 4gb with the unlocker, and also the unofficial community patch does wonders as well.
I know not everyone likes them but the modding community has fixed a lot of these issues, NVAC (New Vegas Anti Crash) being on of the most popular ways to resolve a lot of these issues. Player made mods really do this game justice and thank god for them as having to monitor this constantly would be annoying.
my game runs and as soon as the opening movie is over and the loading screen pops up to enter the actual game it immediatley crashes. my pc is completely up to date too
Great video! Good to know information especially for me who originally played this on a ps3 slim. But, lads, lasses, are we gonna gloss over that thumbnail?
yo the 4gb patcher literally solves all this issue. from a technical perspective its fallout nv not really needing to refresh the ram bc its also meant to run on a ps3, for nv specifically they built for consoles and pcs were kinda an afterthought. but the 4gb patcher esentially allows nv to allocate 4 gigs instead of 2 making the crash cap twice as high. and no you cannot make a mod (to my knowledge) to fix it to where the memory wipe is preformeed every time you load a new area becasue it is a specific script to deload the world when you go into certain places but nv's engine keeps the wasteland loaded for some reason and you cant really stop it from doing that
To answer 3:43 the reason why the amount of RAM is odd yet consistent between PCs is due to the fact that 32-bit processes can only access a max of 2GB of RAM (4GB with a specific flag which is what the 4GB patch does). From my research, it seems that the reason why it can be different on different PCs is due to how the OS allows the process to allocate memory. 2GB is the hard limit, but the actual limit can be lower due to the fact that memory management can get really messy at times, especially when the Page file gets brought into the equation, due every OS desiring RAM to be used as efficiently as possible, which can lead to programs getting their RAM allocated in fragments, while others don't. As a result, I would have to theorize that, unless you were running the exact same suite of hardware and software (including drivers), the way your OS decides to allocate that RAM will be different yet consistent. Something that's always worth noting is that a 32-bit process can only see a 32-bit wide address space (up to a max of 4GB with the large address aware flag), so if other processes cram themselves into that address space, then that can lower the actual RAM said process can use before crashing due to a lack of addressable memory. Edit: Something also worth noting is the fact that Vegas itself CTD's instead of there being a typical "out of memory" crash you might see with other programs. It might be possible that it can self-detect that it's nearing a calculated limit (possibly decided through the various quality options, if I had to guess) and shutting itself down instead of risking running out of memory during an important process (like saving).
Another thing we don't tend to think about anymore, is the amount of VRAM allocated to the current frame on screen. An HD image is 50MB, 4k is 200. I think this might be the primary contributor for all of the comments saying it worked better on older machines- they optimized the game for HD (or possibly even 720p) when they ported it, and it was treading water at that, but now we're all running it at 4k, and that's another 150 megs of a very small pool used up.
@@speedingoffence According to my research, VRAM doesn't actually get counted when it comes to the 2GB limit. I wish I knew why it didn't count but I have yet to find an explanation as to why, just a common consensus of "VRAM doesn't count to the limit".
I used the 4g patch to stop it from crashing all the time. It isn't perfect, but still overall allows you to roam the wasteland without as much crashing.
In the gog versions of 3d all fallout games, i always made manual saves before loading screens\doors, and it would usually let me play until i was done for the day, but stream version crashes a lot more randomly...
Had a similar issue with neptunia rebirth 1 and 3 and what helped fixed that game was a patcher tool that allowed 32 bit apps to use more than their usual amount of ram, this should also fix this issue
Ya, it doesn't actually fix anything, but what it does do is give FNV more room to mess around in without crashing. It's not an elegant solution, but it works!
Microsoft spent a month fixing the leak for Fallout 3 on the Xbox for backwards compatibility. It takes a lot of effort to fix, which is why their version doesn’t crash.
I didn't catch the Gomorrah bit because from Novac to the abandoned factory the game crashed 3 times on my PC, so I installed as many performance mods as I could
I think you could save alot of work by just moding specific areas that are known to cause issues with the ram clearing doors. You could probably completely revolutionize the game with only a dozen or so. Maybe even less.
Memory leaks are real, and this is most definitely a a case of memory leaks. It also doesn't help that by default New Vegas isn't large address aware, which increases the limit from ~2GB to ~4GB on 32 bit applications.
Memory leaks are real, it basically is scenario when memory consumption of process goers out of control and keeps growing till it can no longer get any memory. Along the way it starts running slower and slower and eventually crashes. Usually there are systems in place to prevent this, basically in a way, garbage collection of unnecessary memory, which in this case happens on fast travel for example. But since it isn't done periodically well enough, you have scenarios where it crashes. Which can be fixed by either fixing garbage collection with mod that purges loaded cells, or in other words, interiors. Or with mod that allows New Vegas to be long memory address aware, which allows it to use more RAM. I think it increases it from max of 2GB to 4GB. At 4GB you basically hit maximum of what you can address with 32bit processes. Not saying it is impossible to use more with some kind of trickery, but that isn't present in Fallout NV.
With the power of modern tech it makes me wonder if you can't just do away with caches of RAM and use the full speed of a SSD to prevent a memory leak from building up. Load times of something less than a gig from a SSD can be almost instant.
I have no idea who said that "memory leaks are not real" but that's just ignorance on the matter. In our first year of CS we've quickly learned that especially in programming languages like C (there are programming languages that actively prevent this from happening in different ways), the programmer might allocate some memory with a function such as malloc() or calloc(), which literally takes a portion of RAM and makes it available to store data. If for some reason, due to a bug or the programmer's inexperience you might forget to call the free() function which makes that portion available again for the OS. There could be a lot of reasons why the memory is never freed, but it could be that the programmers just didn't implement a very good memory management. I'd love to hear the developers explanation, it was probably either lack of time or maybe they thought it wasn't going to be such a bad issue, I can't really tell
3:35 all programs have a maximum amount of RAM it can use. You're just more likely to notice it on 32 bit programs, which have a limit of 4 GBs of RAM, where as a 64 bit program can use up to 18.4 exabytes (about 17,179,869,184 gigabytes) of RAM. 32 bit programs also have another downside as most programs are programmed in such a way to use less than 4 gigabytes of RAM, but in the modern day there are programs that patch this.
Whenever I ran from Goodsprings to Novac, to New Vegas (the intended start path), it would crash several times along the way. Whenever I ran from Goodsprings up I-15, through deathclaw territory, to New Vegas, I could reach New Vegas before it crashed once. But when you start adding in the crafting, shootouts, explosions, and other quests being done, not to mention mods that add new things; You really start pushing the limit of how long you can play before it crashes out. There was an old saying that; "You don't play New Vegas, you crash New Vegas." And that is exactly why. The 32bit limit, can not handle the game itself. And if Bethesda didn't have their heads so far up their own asses, New Vegas might have gotten a 64bit 'remaster'; To make it so New Vegas could actually be played. But Bethesda would rather just forget that New Vegas even existed; because Obsidian did a better job in making a more immersive game, than even they could. And under extreme pressure from Bethesda to boot.
Asus Armoury Crate had a memory leak and my games were crashing for about a month. I almost got down to some serious repair work but I found out they were the problem. Somehow an aura light update broke it and removing aura alone fixed it.
There's a huge ass memory leak like this but way more ridiculous. In starfield its so bad i started wondering wtf Bethesda has been doing other than working
Open console, type purgecellbuffer or pcb not sure which it would be for New vegas but the commands tend to be the same across most if not all Creation Engine games.
Memory leaks are very real and easy to explain. Lets say I have a function in my program which allocates a bucket of data. I call the function, the bucket of data gets allocated. Now, in languages like C++, the programmer is responsible for deleting the bucket of data when it's no longer of use. If I call the function again without ever deleting the bucket of data, another bucket is allocated. If it's called many, many times, many buckets of data are allocated without cleaning them up. Many languages and modern C++ even have a concept of garbage collection, which means if allocated in a certain way, something called the garbage collector will go and delete the bucket which isn't being used anymore. The point is, memory leaks are real and a problem many programmers have to consider.
Gotta say, been recently playing the GOG version on 64bit Win 7 with a few dozen mods and have not had a single crash in about 70 hours of game time. For me back in the day the 360 version crashed far more frequently, got so bad I was paranoid about traversing through any door, half of the time the game would just absolutely shit itself and often the save file would be corrupted as well. 360 suffered from a lot of save file corruption, or at least mine did
My NV been crashing non stop since the mission before fixing air filtration for the bos elder and it doesn't seem matter what I do to fix it I fast travel to the hidden valley bunker and my game crashes before betting back out the few times I got out its crashes shortly after so I can't get any more missions done makes me sad it's my first run through NV (playing on disc on xbox one s) could it be me playing on disc 2 that's the problem? If I try disc 1 sometimes my dlc isn't picked up
it's not a Phantom thing. even the console versions of this and Skyrim readily do so (skyrim's memory hog spot tends to be the area around the Volcanic hotspot up to about Shor's Stone, in my experience). and going by my experience as a Bridge Commander modder, which uses the earliest version of the same engine, the error's in the engine itself as well as the assets. modified versions of Star Trek Bridge Commander can swipe up to *4 GIG* of ram...without any fancy assets, and barely any moving characters. contributors include texture sizes (the game was not designed for sheets over 512 square in it's original form), the texture format itself, which takes 1.5 meg of space for a SINGLE 1024, and copy paste scripting by modders. numerous typoes in scripting have been spotted as well, and since THAT game uses Python language, which is notoriously syntax sensitive, a small error can not only cause a crash, but an immediate Blackscreen on startup.
If you are looking for the full Fallout adventure, then I can only recommend "A Tale of Two Wastelands" to EVERYONE. Really. I haven't had a single crash since I installed it. Two games become one and much better in many ways.
I remember being so weirded out that an 8-year old game was crashing so often on my then-brand new gaming laptop. I could play newer games of the time (2018) and have smooth performance, but not FNV. I guess hardware doesn't matter if the code its trying to run is crap. Which is a shame because its such a great game hindered by really annoying issues.
So new Vegas has a memory leak that explains a lot it's funny that two games I used to spend allot of time on have the same problem new Vegas and this little mmo called trove you could set your watch if you had one to how often trove's memory overflowed and crashed
Very similar issues also happened with Dragon Age Origins. If you visited multiple towns and instances, the game would eventually crash. There was a program that raised the amont of memory the game could use to something like 3-4 GB, but it was more of a band aid. The real solution would be to go back and properly code how the game handles the memory. Maybe have a maximum of 3 areas that can be loaded in etc.
It's curious because the Xbox 360 version of the game doesn't crash that much or doesn't even crash, while in the Series X|S version it crashes almost all the time. My guess is that the game wasn't made to be played on high-end components.
After seeing it on PS3, Microsoft lent Zeni a team to tighten up the game for the 360 launch. Really goes to show that another couple of months could have made a huge difference. I'm guess the X/S version isn't the 360 version, but the PC version, which didn't get the same attention.
thousand hours back in the day when this was newish, no issues. maybe pc today has too much ram for it to work properly, ill have to do another playthru and try make it crash
I'm not really sure this is a memory leak, so much as failing to free *enough* memory. A memory leak is generally something unintentional that will lead to run away memory usage. If you just accidentally try to allocate more memory than you have access to, that's not a leak. If something is supposed to be cleaned up but isn't, that's a leak.
I notice on Xbox series x that after an 1 or 2 hours of gameplay it would crash often so I would save and restart the game every hour and I would have little too no crashes on both FO3 and NV and I had over 30hrs on both characters.
x86 applications cannot use more than 4GB of ram, it's simply a limitation of 32-bit pointers, however Windows imposes an additional restriction of 2GB. A 4GB/LargeAddressAware patcher sets a flag in the executable that Windows checks to allow up to 3GB on 32-bit systems (might need an additional OS setting) or 4GB on 64-bit systems (and you can make Wine/Proton always assume LAA on Linux, likely used by Valve for Steam Play certified games). That said, without extensive modding or very long play sessions the game should not crash from running out of memory, I believe there's probably segmentation faults and null pointer reads going on. Basically, a programming error leads the game to either access invalid or nonexistent memory. I believe New Vegas Anti-Crash sets up low level exception (error) handlers specifically to catch these sorts of errors and try to ignore/correct them, which is why it gets rid of so many crashes.
Sheesh. Its same glitchy Bethesda's Creation engine - and it uses same fixes all the way back from Oblivion - manually editing of ".ini" file to reduce number of cells (interior/exterior spaces) kept in memory as well as force purging of cells from memory. Please refer to Fallout forums for exact files/commands/numbers. Plus ofc mods that help stop crashing, including NVSE plugins are of great help.
I don't think this is a memory leak. A memory leak happens when the programmer loses the address for some variable in memory, leading the address to be occupied but inaccessible. Once you lose a variable address there is no way to get it back. The fact that NV can still clear memory tells me it's not a memory leak because if it were NV wouldn't have access to the address that need to be cleared. This seems to be more of a memory overflow error. I don't think NV is losing track of memory addresses, I just think there were special circumstances the developers didn't consider when designing their memory management system, leading them to go over their memory budget. I'm not sure why people thought this was a memory leak, but I do have a theory. Both memory leaks and memory overflows cause the same kind of error: a segmentation fault. A segmentation fault is essentially the operating system yelling at the program for going outside the memory the OS allocated to the program. A lot of programmer will think a segmentation fault is indicative of a memory leak, but a segmentation fault could be caused by a lot of different scenarios
Only time new Vegas has ever crashed for me is when I used the populated casinos mod and the randomizer mod at the same time and went into a casino. Maybe I just fast travel a lot idk
I always thought the crash was caused by a double-free and the memory-manager has a set limit to start freeing "unused" data and accidently frees memory that was already freed. The function probably was implemented recursively to navigate a tree and either ends up accessing already freed memory or trying to free it.
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.
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
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?
At the start of the game, I walked up the road a bit, and tried to fast travel back to Goodsprings, but it kept crashing. The solution was to fast travel while standing instead of crouching. So damn weird.
There's no way that should matter, but it's Bethesda, so I totally buy it.
I absolutely love this type of video. A deep dive on a niche game from my childhood. Great work.
More to come!
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 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
Thank you for explaining this in a simple way. I'm 30 years old, and still learning something new every day
Memory leak is one thing, memory fragmentation is another: when the game wants to allocate, say, 100 meg chunk but all the freeing and allocating has turned the heap into swiss cheese, it can't find a continuous 100 meg chunk, allocation fails, and the game crashes. This used to be a thing in low memory environments (640k is enough for everybody etc), but we're hitting the same issue with 32 bit apps now.
im amazed how practical and genuine you came to the conclusion, great way of documenting
That's very nice of you to say!
there is a mod that increases the memory before the crash but there's still a build up on longer gaming sessions
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.
I would say this is NOT a memory leak. Memory leak means you've lost the pointer/reference to the memory and can't free it or access it anymore.
But as you've said in the video, fast traveling would have freed that memory.
Thus it's just that excessive memory usage for the 32bit platform, not a memory leak.
Agreed.
Essentially, Fallout has a bucket. When the game needs memory for something, it fills the bucket with water. When it no longer needs the memory, then that bucket is drained. The bucket is also a finite size.
A memory leak happens when that last step isn't performed and the game crashes when the bucket overflows onto the nice carpet below it.
Best workaround I've found online.
1. Save a File at Doc's house before using the VIGOR.
2. If your game crashes load the Doc File.
3. Immediately load from Docs house into your most recent save.
It's worked almost everytime. Considering I've lost countless saves even with the 4GB patch or NVSE modded in.
Neato, I always knew that wandering endlessly in the wastes would eventually lead to the game crashing but never knew why exactly
The 4GB RAM Patch works well in alleviating the crashes in my experience. There are a lot of mods out there which also help with stability and (some of) the best I've used are lStewieAl's Tweaks, New Vegas Tick Fix and New Vegas Heap Replacer. This is nowhere near a comprehensive list and if you are a first-time modder, try to not download anything big such as texture replacers and only add mods one at a time as if you don't, then you're going to be having a hard time when something breaks.
As for memory leaks: Oh, they do exist! They effectively use RAM but never clear said RAM for use later on once the game is done with it, which is why when you go through many instance gates in perpetuity, the game will eventually run out of RAM and cause it to crash. It all comes down to when, not if, the game will crash unless you reboot the game every say 30 minutes or so. It's a tedious issue that I believe Oblivion suffers from as well. Heck, even the original Skyrim had this issue as it was a 32Bit game engine whereas the newer iterations are 64Bit which is a darn Godsend! :D
I'm also not sure if this is an accurate list as it can, and will, change with time but for now, this is a good selection of mods to avoid including some even I have used myself like Project Nevada and Electro-City: vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/avoid-mods.html
I wouldn't call this a memory leak, just an inconsistent memory manager. it makes sense to keep a couple of cells in memory, so if the player decides to go back they don't have to sit through a long loading screen. it's just bad that the game doesn't seem to know how big each cell is, otherwise it could just clear old cells if it's about to hit the ram limit.
I'd say that's it on the head. The buffer is redundant now, too, since these 100-MB-top zones load in a tenth of second from an SSD.
@@speedingoffence well yeah now things are different, but that wasn't the case when the game was made.
Not expecting a Bethesda game to crash often is like not expecting the sun to rise in the morning
there are some... misunderstandings here
the game world's outdoor spaces are "worldspaces" divided into grid cells. each interior is just one single cell existing outside of any grid (i.e. same basic data structure and behaviors as an exterior cell)
the reason camp mccarran would appear to "clear memory" is because it's a separate worldspace, so the game can unload the main vegas worldspace. in general, any outdoor space that shares the LOD of the main vegas space but not its actual content will be its own worldspace; they share LOD via a parent/child relationship. for a comparison, each of DC's segmented areas in FO3 was its own worldspace separate from the main capital wasteland, as could be seen with out-of-bounds glitches
looks like interiors are handled similarly to skyrim: there's a limited number of recently loaded interiors that the game will keep loaded (but stop actively simulating) after you leave them. it should dump the least recently loaded interiors as you load more of them, and i _expect_ it would do this entirely unrelated to what worldspaces you load and how. id be surprised if walking into camp mccarran's gate reliably cleared the interior cell buffer for example, though entering the interior of the building inside of that could bump another interior out of the buffer
if the game is just going by number of interiors and not the total memory an interior would consume (which _would_ be kinda difficult) then that cache might just be too large
Memory leak is definitely a real thing. It's basically reserving blocks of memory but then forgetting to unreserve it for other uses.
I appreciate you sharing your knowledge, but a lot of comments here don’t quite get the context of the “are memory leaks real” question asked in the video. The person behind this channel knows that there is such a thing as a memory leak in general. The video is addressing the online debate among people playing _New Vegas_ about whether the game’s most frequent cause of crashes is memory leaks in that specific application, or whether they’re caused by other issues. It’s not a debate as to whether memory leaks are a phenomenon in general; the video isn’t positing a conspiracy theory where Big Coder has hoaxed us all into believing in the fiction of memory leaks.
I remember crashing A LOT limping back to The Sink in OWB about a decade back...
...hoo! Time flies!
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
I want to see what the task manager looks like in dead money, because even with mods that reduce crashing in the vanilla game to once or twice per playthrough, its guaranteed to crash all the time when playing dead money and only dead money
This is what I was thinking as well
That explains why it is suggested to fast travel to discovered locations as soon as you have the opportunity.
New Vegas was designed to run with little ram, that means it crashes a lot. The 4GB patch usually fixes most crashing unless you have a billion mods which tbf we all do. Honestly Bethesda or whoever should just update the game with a hotfix that natively adds the patch, but they won't do that.
I think the GoG version does. But you want the steam one, because it's easier to mod.
Everyone who has ever programmed in C or C++ just screamed in agony when you said you weren’t sure if memory leaks were real
What's interesting is, while NV definitely does have leaks, what I show here is actually not one of them. The game IS clearing the cache, it's just doing it poorly.
Memory leaks are just when an application fails to release memory it is no longer using. Whether memory is "in-use" or not is really up to the application. High memory usage, in and of itself is not an issue yet. It only becomes an issue when an application is requesting for memory that the OS can no longer provide. This can happen in a few ways. One is that there simply isn't enough physical memory, but this should be rare as the OS is smart enough to temporarily offload memory from other applications to your hard disk so that your main application can get more memory, and then restore it when the other application becomes active again (the slower your hard disk, the more noticeable this is, as it may lag as it does this).
What's more likely is that, as the application requests and releases memory over time, memory fragmentation becomes a real issue. Memory fragmentation happens when there is technically enough free memory to be requested/allocated, but not as a single block, which is how memory is generally allocated. This happens when you release smaller blocks of memory and request larger blocks of memory later. So while all the small pockets of memory that are available might add up to more than what an application requests, the OS will not allow that memory to be collected (or defragment) to be doled out in a single large block, which makes that request for memory fail. Once a memory request fails, most applications will crash on the spot unless they accounted for this and free up larger chunks of memory and try again, though this is not guaranteed to address the issue.
As an example, let's say I had 10MB of memory. I request 3 2MB blocks of memory. I do what I need to do and release one of the blocks. Depending on which block that was (and my application is not going to know how the OS gives you that memory or where in physical memory it's from), my next request for a 5MB block of memory might succeed or it might fail, because there is no contiguous 5 MB of memory available to me, even though, technically, there should be a total of 6MB of memory available.
I'm surprised Vegas didn't crash at the beginning just by having task manager open
If you have a low end computer and play Remnant 2 you will find out right quick that memory leaks are real. It doesn't crash it just lowers your FPS over time until it's a perma slideshow until you reopen the game.
Here's my take on the whole memory leak thing. Neckbeards will say "it's not a real thing" because to them, it's not specific enough to be a useful term, as it's really an umbrella term for a whole bunch of different situations that could cause the symptom so very well described by @StarkeRealm below. That said, to the average person, who just wants to know why their computer isn't working and what in general is causing it, it's perfectly fine IMO.
Ya, I heard a couple definitions that were a bit too ambiguous. I like my definitions cut and dry.
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:
Obsidian only had 18 months to finish the game. It would have been more stable if Obsidian had 2 years (24 months) instead. The game was rushed and yet Obsidian still managed to make a game that is still being played today. This is the GOAT.
This is a problem with the engine, Starfield even has the issue. One of the reasons is because all those loose items you can pick up or drop the location of where that item is has to be tracked so if you drop a pile of shotguns on the strip they will sit there. The other thing is auto save and the more you interact with loose objects in the world the bigger the save file will become. You can play New Vegas with no crashes if you turn on Autosave and have limited interaction with loose objects in the world. The fastest way to crash New Vegas or any game on the Source engines is to take demolition and just go crazy your game will become unplayable at some point.
After playing New Vegas again and revisiting this vid; Inventory items are counted towards the total RAM usage.
I have tried playing the game with barely anything in my inventory, and it is fairly stable.
And compared that, to having a metric ton of ammo in my inventory.
It takes a hell of a lot of tries to even get into the McCaren terminal. And even walking into the Gomorrah, crashes 100% of the time. So yeah, it's something that you really gotta watch out for.
That's a good test.
@@speedingoffence,
Well, ammo on anything less than 'hardcore mode' is weightless; So it's an easy item to test with, while still being able to move around.
Plus that is probably the number 1 cause of crashes; Seeing as how you really need a lot of ammo to deal with the 'bullet sponge' enemies. So everyone, I mean everyone, would seemingly stockpile it, whenever, and wherever, they can.
this explains why the Big MT crashes as often as it does.
yeah, fast traveling regularly really does the trick for me...
Theoretically, a 32-bit application is limited to a 4GB address space. In practice, windows limits 32-bit programs to 2GB. If the "large address aware" flag is enabled on the executable, windows will allow it to use more. I forget exactly how much more. In any case, it is odd to me that New Vegas seems to have a cap at around 1GB, as this doesn't line up with the known limits. They probably did some weird stuff with their memory management.
This was fixed ages ago, and yes, memory leak is a thing.
Ask the mod authors of the unofficial patch and New Vegas Script Extender.
What is evidence is the 4gb unlocker mod, which allows the game to act like it’s x64 bit or something. It helped me avoid many crashes, but it’s very apparent when I re-install the game without this mod. Typically my game of New Vegas does not exceed 4gb with the unlocker, and also the unofficial community patch does wonders as well.
i was going to start a tale of two wastelands playthrough after i see family for thanksgiving, bless you for this
I know not everyone likes them but the modding community has fixed a lot of these issues, NVAC (New Vegas Anti Crash) being on of the most popular ways to resolve a lot of these issues. Player made mods really do this game justice and thank god for them as having to monitor this constantly would be annoying.
my game runs and as soon as the opening movie is over and the loading screen pops up to enter the actual game it immediatley crashes. my pc is completely up to date too
Great video! Good to know information especially for me who originally played this on a ps3 slim. But, lads, lasses, are we gonna gloss over that thumbnail?
“Man this look pretty good..- where yo clothes at?”
Hate to break the immersion, but there's a shirt under that hair.
Without the 4 Gig patch, the 2 Gig mark causes the crash. Where 4 theoreticaly allows more mods to load in before breaking
yo the 4gb patcher literally solves all this issue. from a technical perspective its fallout nv not really needing to refresh the ram bc its also meant to run on a ps3, for nv specifically they built for consoles and pcs were kinda an afterthought. but the 4gb patcher esentially allows nv to allocate 4 gigs instead of 2 making the crash cap twice as high. and no you cannot make a mod (to my knowledge) to fix it to where the memory wipe is preformeed every time you load a new area becasue it is a specific script to deload the world when you go into certain places but nv's engine keeps the wasteland loaded for some reason and you cant really stop it from doing that
To answer 3:43 the reason why the amount of RAM is odd yet consistent between PCs is due to the fact that 32-bit processes can only access a max of 2GB of RAM (4GB with a specific flag which is what the 4GB patch does). From my research, it seems that the reason why it can be different on different PCs is due to how the OS allows the process to allocate memory. 2GB is the hard limit, but the actual limit can be lower due to the fact that memory management can get really messy at times, especially when the Page file gets brought into the equation, due every OS desiring RAM to be used as efficiently as possible, which can lead to programs getting their RAM allocated in fragments, while others don't.
As a result, I would have to theorize that, unless you were running the exact same suite of hardware and software (including drivers), the way your OS decides to allocate that RAM will be different yet consistent. Something that's always worth noting is that a 32-bit process can only see a 32-bit wide address space (up to a max of 4GB with the large address aware flag), so if other processes cram themselves into that address space, then that can lower the actual RAM said process can use before crashing due to a lack of addressable memory.
Edit: Something also worth noting is the fact that Vegas itself CTD's instead of there being a typical "out of memory" crash you might see with other programs. It might be possible that it can self-detect that it's nearing a calculated limit (possibly decided through the various quality options, if I had to guess) and shutting itself down instead of risking running out of memory during an important process (like saving).
Another thing we don't tend to think about anymore, is the amount of VRAM allocated to the current frame on screen. An HD image is 50MB, 4k is 200. I think this might be the primary contributor for all of the comments saying it worked better on older machines- they optimized the game for HD (or possibly even 720p) when they ported it, and it was treading water at that, but now we're all running it at 4k, and that's another 150 megs of a very small pool used up.
@@speedingoffence According to my research, VRAM doesn't actually get counted when it comes to the 2GB limit. I wish I knew why it didn't count but I have yet to find an explanation as to why, just a common consensus of "VRAM doesn't count to the limit".
I used the 4g patch to stop it from crashing all the time. It isn't perfect, but still overall allows you to roam the wasteland without as much crashing.
In the gog versions of 3d all fallout games, i always made manual saves before loading screens\doors, and it would usually let me play until i was done for the day, but stream version crashes a lot more randomly...
Had a similar issue with neptunia rebirth 1 and 3 and what helped fixed that game was a patcher tool that allowed 32 bit apps to use more than their usual amount of ram, this should also fix this issue
The 4GB patch handles this issue very well. That alone eliminates most crashes
Ya, it doesn't actually fix anything, but what it does do is give FNV more room to mess around in without crashing. It's not an elegant solution, but it works!
Microsoft spent a month fixing the leak for Fallout 3 on the Xbox for backwards compatibility. It takes a lot of effort to fix, which is why their version doesn’t crash.
I didn't catch the Gomorrah bit because from Novac to the abandoned factory the game crashed 3 times on my PC, so I installed as many performance mods as I could
I think you could save alot of work by just moding specific areas that are known to cause issues with the ram clearing doors.
You could probably completely revolutionize the game with only a dozen or so. Maybe even less.
Memory leaks are real, and this is most definitely a a case of memory leaks. It also doesn't help that by default New Vegas isn't large address aware, which increases the limit from ~2GB to ~4GB on 32 bit applications.
is it because windows counts storage weirdly with their own units that have a slightly different name and just one of your systems didn’t do it?
Memory leaks are real, it basically is scenario when memory consumption of process goers out of control and keeps growing till it can no longer get any memory. Along the way it starts running slower and slower and eventually crashes. Usually there are systems in place to prevent this, basically in a way, garbage collection of unnecessary memory, which in this case happens on fast travel for example. But since it isn't done periodically well enough, you have scenarios where it crashes. Which can be fixed by either fixing garbage collection with mod that purges loaded cells, or in other words, interiors. Or with mod that allows New Vegas to be long memory address aware, which allows it to use more RAM. I think it increases it from max of 2GB to 4GB. At 4GB you basically hit maximum of what you can address with 32bit processes. Not saying it is impossible to use more with some kind of trickery, but that isn't present in Fallout NV.
With the power of modern tech it makes me wonder if you can't just do away with caches of RAM and use the full speed of a SSD to prevent a memory leak from building up. Load times of something less than a gig from a SSD can be almost instant.
M.2 is awfully close, yes. Lot of talk about doing just what you just said.
I have no idea who said that "memory leaks are not real" but that's just ignorance on the matter. In our first year of CS we've quickly learned that especially in programming languages like C (there are programming languages that actively prevent this from happening in different ways), the programmer might allocate some memory with a function such as malloc() or calloc(), which literally takes a portion of RAM and makes it available to store data. If for some reason, due to a bug or the programmer's inexperience you might forget to call the free() function which makes that portion available again for the OS. There could be a lot of reasons why the memory is never freed, but it could be that the programmers just didn't implement a very good memory management. I'd love to hear the developers explanation, it was probably either lack of time or maybe they thought it wasn't going to be such a bad issue, I can't really tell
3:35 all programs have a maximum amount of RAM it can use. You're just more likely to notice it on 32 bit programs, which have a limit of 4 GBs of RAM, where as a 64 bit program can use up to 18.4 exabytes (about 17,179,869,184 gigabytes) of RAM. 32 bit programs also have another downside as most programs are programmed in such a way to use less than 4 gigabytes of RAM, but in the modern day there are programs that patch this.
in my restless dreams i see it, 64 bit fallout new vegas.
I started replaying it this week and forgot it freezes the game when you buy 2 of the same caravan cards at once and lost 3 hours of progress
Whenever I ran from Goodsprings to Novac, to New Vegas (the intended start path), it would crash several times along the way. Whenever I ran from Goodsprings up I-15, through deathclaw territory, to New Vegas, I could reach New Vegas before it crashed once. But when you start adding in the crafting, shootouts, explosions, and other quests being done, not to mention mods that add new things; You really start pushing the limit of how long you can play before it crashes out.
There was an old saying that; "You don't play New Vegas, you crash New Vegas."
And that is exactly why. The 32bit limit, can not handle the game itself. And if Bethesda didn't have their heads so far up their own asses, New Vegas might have gotten a 64bit 'remaster'; To make it so New Vegas could actually be played. But Bethesda would rather just forget that New Vegas even existed; because Obsidian did a better job in making a more immersive game, than even they could. And under extreme pressure from Bethesda to boot.
Should try this in Big Mountain, that place loves to crash.
Asus Armoury Crate had a memory leak and my games were crashing for about a month. I almost got down to some serious repair work but I found out they were the problem. Somehow an aura light update broke it and removing aura alone fixed it.
There's a huge ass memory leak like this but way more ridiculous. In starfield its so bad i started wondering wtf Bethesda has been doing other than working
I feel blessed cause my super modded new vegas dosent crash hardly ever unless theirs like some mod collisions
Open console, type purgecellbuffer or pcb not sure which it would be for New vegas but the commands tend to be the same across most if not all Creation Engine games.
Memory leaks are very real and easy to explain. Lets say I have a function in my program which allocates a bucket of data. I call the function, the bucket of data gets allocated. Now, in languages like C++, the programmer is responsible for deleting the bucket of data when it's no longer of use. If I call the function again without ever deleting the bucket of data, another bucket is allocated. If it's called many, many times, many buckets of data are allocated without cleaning them up. Many languages and modern C++ even have a concept of garbage collection, which means if allocated in a certain way, something called the garbage collector will go and delete the bucket which isn't being used anymore. The point is, memory leaks are real and a problem many programmers have to consider.
Reminder: All ES and Fallout games after Morrowind are just mods of Morrowind.
Gotta say, been recently playing the GOG version on 64bit Win 7 with a few dozen mods and have not had a single crash in about 70 hours of game time.
For me back in the day the 360 version crashed far more frequently, got so bad I was paranoid about traversing through any door, half of the time the game would just absolutely shit itself and often the save file would be corrupted as well. 360 suffered from a lot of save file corruption, or at least mine did
A super useful video, thank you !
My NV been crashing non stop since the mission before fixing air filtration for the bos elder and it doesn't seem matter what I do to fix it I fast travel to the hidden valley bunker and my game crashes before betting back out the few times I got out its crashes shortly after so I can't get any more missions done makes me sad it's my first run through NV (playing on disc on xbox one s) could it be me playing on disc 2 that's the problem? If I try disc 1 sometimes my dlc isn't picked up
it's not a Phantom thing. even the console versions of this and Skyrim readily do so (skyrim's memory hog spot tends to be the area around the Volcanic hotspot up to about Shor's Stone, in my experience). and going by my experience as a Bridge Commander modder, which uses the earliest version of the same engine, the error's in the engine itself as well as the assets. modified versions of Star Trek Bridge Commander can swipe up to *4 GIG* of ram...without any fancy assets, and barely any moving characters. contributors include texture sizes (the game was not designed for sheets over 512 square in it's original form), the texture format itself, which takes 1.5 meg of space for a SINGLE 1024, and copy paste scripting by modders. numerous typoes in scripting have been spotted as well, and since THAT game uses Python language, which is notoriously syntax sensitive, a small error can not only cause a crash, but an immediate Blackscreen on startup.
If you are looking for the full Fallout adventure, then I can only recommend "A Tale of Two Wastelands" to EVERYONE. Really. I haven't had a single crash since I installed it. Two games become one and much better in many ways.
I'm actually having issues with crashes as we speak! I'll just fast travel here and there 😊 thanks!
I remember being so weirded out that an 8-year old game was crashing so often on my then-brand new gaming laptop. I could play newer games of the time (2018) and have smooth performance, but not FNV. I guess hardware doesn't matter if the code its trying to run is crap. Which is a shame because its such a great game hindered by really annoying issues.
The Todd’s curse
So new Vegas has a memory leak that explains a lot it's funny that two games I used to spend allot of time on have the same problem new Vegas and this little mmo called trove you could set your watch if you had one to how often trove's memory overflowed and crashed
I remember playing this game on Xbox One, and it was my first time playing it.. once Doc Mitchell stood me up, he looked at me and my game crashed...
War never changes...
Very similar issues also happened with Dragon Age Origins. If you visited multiple towns and instances, the game would eventually crash. There was a program that raised the amont of memory the game could use to something like 3-4 GB, but it was more of a band aid. The real solution would be to go back and properly code how the game handles the memory. Maybe have a maximum of 3 areas that can be loaded in etc.
It's curious because the Xbox 360 version of the game doesn't crash that much or doesn't even crash, while in the Series X|S version it crashes almost all the time. My guess is that the game wasn't made to be played on high-end components.
After seeing it on PS3, Microsoft lent Zeni a team to tighten up the game for the 360 launch. Really goes to show that another couple of months could have made a huge difference.
I'm guess the X/S version isn't the 360 version, but the PC version, which didn't get the same attention.
thousand hours back in the day when this was newish, no issues. maybe pc today has too much ram for it to work properly, ill have to do another playthru and try make it crash
I really, really enjoyed this video. Nice job, dude.
I'm not really sure this is a memory leak, so much as failing to free *enough* memory. A memory leak is generally something unintentional that will lead to run away memory usage. If you just accidentally try to allocate more memory than you have access to, that's not a leak. If something is supposed to be cleaned up but isn't, that's a leak.
I agree. It's sloppy, but it's not a leak.
I notice on Xbox series x that after an 1 or 2 hours of gameplay it would crash often so I would save and restart the game every hour and I would have little too no crashes on both FO3 and NV and I had over 30hrs on both characters.
x86 applications cannot use more than 4GB of ram, it's simply a limitation of 32-bit pointers, however Windows imposes an additional restriction of 2GB.
A 4GB/LargeAddressAware patcher sets a flag in the executable that Windows checks to allow up to 3GB on 32-bit systems (might need an additional OS setting) or 4GB on 64-bit systems (and you can make Wine/Proton always assume LAA on Linux, likely used by Valve for Steam Play certified games).
That said, without extensive modding or very long play sessions the game should not crash from running out of memory, I believe there's probably segmentation faults and null pointer reads going on.
Basically, a programming error leads the game to either access invalid or nonexistent memory.
I believe New Vegas Anti-Crash sets up low level exception (error) handlers specifically to catch these sorts of errors and try to ignore/correct them, which is why it gets rid of so many crashes.
good to finally understand why the game crashes so much. it makes perfect sense.
Sheesh. Its same glitchy Bethesda's Creation engine - and it uses same fixes all the way back from Oblivion - manually editing of ".ini" file to reduce number of cells (interior/exterior spaces) kept in memory as well as force purging of cells from memory. Please refer to Fallout forums for exact files/commands/numbers. Plus ofc mods that help stop crashing, including NVSE plugins are of great help.
So that's why the 64-bit update fixes everything
Very cool video, enjoyed learning more about my favorite game!
I don't think this is a memory leak. A memory leak happens when the programmer loses the address for some variable in memory, leading the address to be occupied but inaccessible. Once you lose a variable address there is no way to get it back. The fact that NV can still clear memory tells me it's not a memory leak because if it were NV wouldn't have access to the address that need to be cleared.
This seems to be more of a memory overflow error. I don't think NV is losing track of memory addresses, I just think there were special circumstances the developers didn't consider when designing their memory management system, leading them to go over their memory budget.
I'm not sure why people thought this was a memory leak, but I do have a theory. Both memory leaks and memory overflows cause the same kind of error: a segmentation fault. A segmentation fault is essentially the operating system yelling at the program for going outside the memory the OS allocated to the program. A lot of programmer will think a segmentation fault is indicative of a memory leak, but a segmentation fault could be caused by a lot of different scenarios
Ya, that's the consensus is that, while it sure looks like a memory leak, it's technically not.
The 4Gb New Vegas mod/patch will probably help stop this.
Only time new Vegas has ever crashed for me is when I used the populated casinos mod and the randomizer mod at the same time and went into a casino. Maybe I just fast travel a lot idk
Very great video, Informative and compact.
Thank you. I try to get right to the point.
I always thought the crash was caused by a double-free and the memory-manager has a set limit to start freeing "unused" data and accidently frees memory that was already freed. The function probably was implemented recursively to navigate a tree and either ends up accessing already freed memory or trying to free it.
Sucks for people who try to maintain immersion by not fast traveling.
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.
So not only was New Vegas designed with fast travel required from a gameplay perspective, but from a technical perspective as well.