29 réponses à ce sujet

[Semihage]

Anyone seeing similiar issue?  When I first start the game the loading time is pretty fast, but as I travel through more areas, the loading time start getting longer and longer.. and eventually it can even reach 3 mins mark (at the very start it's only 10 sec).. If I save then restart the game, it goes away but eventually it will come back. Seems like there is a resource leak somewhere.

This is enough to stop me to replay the game or even thinking about getting DLC.. It's just very frustrating that I have to restart the game every 15 mins or so due to insane load time.

Modifié par Semihage, 24 novembre 2009 - 03:45 .

[Rubbish Hero]

Yes alot of people have this issue.

Apparently it's a memory leak or something.

[TallBearNC]

There's already tons of threads that have addressed this.... as your save games store more data and you explore more of the world requiring more and more of the game state to be stored in memory the game will eventually use 2G or more ram depending on if ur on a 32 or 64 bit OS.



I have found no evidence of a leak. When I load a saved game (lets say about 1-2 hours from the END fo the game). RIGHT AFTER the load, about 1.6GB of ram is used. That's not a leak. a leak happens slowly as you play and WILL cause a crash. This game is just a ram pig imo. I have yet to see any real evidence of a memory leak

[Selvec_Darkon]

Indeed. It sounds as if Bioware just needs to tell the game to stop using beyond 2 gig's of ram. To clear the memory when it reaches a certain amount.

[Semihage]

It IS a leak... Suer the game save states as you explore world, but if I can load the game in 10 sec at the start up and subsequence load the next few area in less than 10-20 sec, then after playing a while, my load time turns into 2 mins until I restart. This is obviously resource management problem here.. Leak doesn't always mean crash, it can be poor cache management causing dramatic slow down.



If the game truly requires 2 gig of data at all time, that's fine, but it does not explain why when I first load my saved game everything is fast then eventually it slows down to 2 mins load time after playing for 15 mins. If it's truly what you have claimed, then we should have seen long loading time right off the bat, but that's not the case, so it's a leak.

[TallBearNC]

Wrong. As you play the game keeps all textures from the prev areas you visited in ram, the more times you zone... the more textures are saved up. If the game had a TRUE leak, it would crash within an hour or two with an out of memory error, and I haven't seen ONE case of this. The game is just a RAM pig. I have zero slowdowns on my desktop. I have 12GB of ram. Eventually the game hits a cap and won't use anymore.. but I have no slow downs at all. if it were a LEAK.. the memory would go up and up and up... but after a time it will CAP... which shows there is no leak.


the problem is the "cap" is set way up at 2GB on 32bit mac hines and 4GB on 64 bit machines. So people with 4GB or less on a 64bit OS will suffer huge performance hits over time. People with 32bit oses can only use up to 3GB of ram.. and after the game caps our around 2gb, between that and windows, you have no file cache left and you are grinding on your swap file.

Again if there was a leak, the game would up and crash with with an out of memory error and it doesn't do that.

Modifié par TallBearNC, 24 novembre 2009 - 05:56 .

[Chozo Knight]

It's not a memory leak, but it *IS* a poorly optimized caching system in the game engine. They need to make it dump the cache in RAM after a while, or it takes up too much space and results in lots of swapping to the hard drive... and crappy load times as result.

[Semihage]

TallBearNC wrote...

 As you play the game keeps all textures from the prev areas you visited in ram, the more times you zone... .

That's the very definition of leaking! Why in gods name would it need to save texture of previous zone? To speed up load time? How about the fact that the long time is getting longer?

The more likely scenario here is simply poor memory management that easily lead to memory fragmentation.  It doesn't matter if the game pre-allocates 2 gig of ram at the start up, what matter is how it's being used.  If the game makes too much frequemt temporary small allocatoin that ends up fragmenting the heap, then what you end up seeing is too many small spaces that can't be used for anything.. Even though it does not blow up your preallocated memory, in essence it is still leaking.

Not every game allocates from Windows resource management, they could simply do a preallocation and wrap around their own allocator. Your task manager simply isn't going to display those embedded heap information. 

[Semihage]

TallBearNC wrote...

 As you play the game keeps all textures from the prev areas you visited in ram, the more times you zone... .

That's the very definition of leaking! Why in gods name would it need to save texture of previous zone? To speed up load time? How about the fact that the long time is getting longer?

The more likely scenario here is simply poor memory management that easily lead to memory fragmentation.  It doesn't matter if the game pre-allocates 2 gig of ram at the start up, what matter is how it's being used.  If the game makes too much frequemt temporary small allocatoin that ends up fragmenting the heap, then what you end up seeing is too many small spaces that can't be used for anything.. Even though it does not blow up your preallocated memory, in essence it is still leaking.

Not every game allocates from Windows resource management, they could simply do a preallocation and wrap around their own allocator. Your task manager simply isn't going to display those embedded heap information. 

[TallBearNC]

Semihage wrote...

TallBearNC wrote...

 As you play the game keeps all textures from the prev areas you visited in ram, the more times you zone... .

That's the very definition of leaking! Why in gods name would it need to save texture of previous zone? To speed up load time? How about the fact that the long time is getting longer?

The more likely scenario here is simply poor memory management that easily lead to memory fragmentation.  It doesn't matter if the game pre-allocates 2 gig of ram at the start up, what matter is how it's being used.  If the game makes too much frequemt temporary small allocatoin that ends up fragmenting the heap, then what you end up seeing is too many small spaces that can't be used for anything.. Even though it does not blow up your preallocated memory, in essence it is still leaking.

Not every game allocates from Windows resource management, they could simply do a preallocation and wrap around their own allocator. Your task manager simply isn't going to display those embedded heap information. 

Again you are wrong. a memory leak is the UNINTENTIONAL leaking of ram.. data left behind that the program has forgotten about and can NOT unload... try programing business and games for 20 yrs like I have then you will know what a real leak is.

The game is overzealous about keeping zone and texture data in ram, NORMALLY this would speed up any game, but since this game caches so much, it GREATLY will impact performance on machines with <6GB of ram.

It's POOR memory management vs a leak. What the game SHOULD do is check the machines PHYSICAL ram and adjust memory management accordingly and unload unused textures on systems with lower memory.

For people like me, the way the game is designed is GREAT! The longer I play, the FASTER I zone. After 8 hrs of play I can go anywhere in the world and I zone in <2s and it doesn't even touch the HD to load the zone

[TallBearNC]

Chozo Knight wrote...

It's not a memory leak, but it *IS* a poorly optimized caching system in the game engine. They need to make it dump the cache in RAM after a while, or it takes up too much space and results in lots of swapping to the hard drive... and crappy load times as result.

Bingo - couldn't have said it any better

[TallBearNC]

Honestly BW should have made a 32bit client of this game and LIMITED to like 1-1.5GB of ram use, then a 64bit client of the game with UNLIMITED use of ram. That would have solved a lot of these issues. Crysis is a GOOD example of good coding, design and memory management.



Gaming companies simply need to start making 64bit clients and start putting in perks in the 64bit clients that aren't in the 32bit clients to encourage people to move.. better yet microsoft needs to STOP making 32bit OSes.. hopefully win 7 will be the last.. then with the next OS from MS.. it will force people into the 64bit world.

[mrbrian200]

TallBearNC wrote...

.... as your save games store more data and you explore more of the world requiring more and more of the game state to be stored in memory the game will eventually use 2G or more ram depending on if ur on a 32 or 64 bit OS.

If that were solely the cause then exiting/reloading would not make much of a difference, but it does.  There's definately something going on that can probably be addressed.  Bugs of this nature often affect certain configurations more than others.   This behavior may be typical of a memory leak but could also be caused by anything including DX, OS pagefile handling, or even an audio card buffer.  I have no doubt Bioware has the talent and will dedicate the resources to figure it out.  They had Bioshock running pretty slick...although it did take many months after initial release to get the issues mostly addressed/patched.  Im sure they have their hands full with DAO, particularly considering a new OS hit the market.

For me...it's not a big deal, when I start noticing longer load times and choppy frame rates it takes less than a minute to save/exit/reload, after which the game runs flawless for the next hour or two.

[TallBearNC]

Of course exiting and reloading the game works.. when you exit the game EVERYTHING is unloaded... when you load back in only your save data, the state of the world and ONLY the textures and zone you are in load up... so yes... ram use is reduced.. makes perfect sense

[TallBearNC]

but anyway you look at it.. be it a leak.. or be it poor/improper, or overzealous texture caching.. BW needs to fix it



However *I* don't have a problem with it lol. My game runs faster and faster the longer I play.. it's almost like they made the game for an i7 or quad core system running a 64 bit OS with 6+ GB of ram... now if they based their design specs of that.. HUGE mistake and the requirements on the box and online should be much MUCH higher

[Titius.Vibius]

Chozo Knight wrote...

It's not a memory leak, but it *IS* a poorly optimized caching system in the game engine. They need to make it dump the cache in RAM after a while, or it takes up too much space and results in lots of swapping to the hard drive... and crappy load times as result.

Yup this is true, they need to come up with a fix to optimize the game. Not everyone have a minimum of 4 GB of useable RAM.

[Semihage]

Hold on a sec.. are you saying Bioware INTENTIONALLY decide to thrash the ram with poor cache managment and increase loading speed? It's great that you have 6+ gig worth of the ram, but that is not the requirement here, and it does not have to be the requirement as well. Seems like we are just argueing sematics here, but when you have a cache management that thrashes and end up slowing down your system, you are in essence leaking. Sure the allocations are still tracked, but they are not helping.

[Titius.Vibius]

TallBearNC wrote...

but anyway you look at it.. be it a leak.. or be it poor/improper, or overzealous texture caching.. BW needs to fix it

However *I* don't have a problem with it lol. My game runs faster and faster the longer I play.. it's almost like they made the game for an i7 or quad core system running a 64 bit OS with 6+ GB of ram... now if they based their design specs of that.. HUGE mistake and the requirements on the box and online should be much MUCH higher

You're not helping, instead making it more obvious that EA QA was in fact using monstrous i7 machines. LOL

[Rubbish Hero]

What ever it is, it needs sorted, soon.

[TallBearNC]

Correct there's no need for us to split hairs. The game has a fundemental memory problem, be it a TRUE leak (Semi and I differ on defining what a leak is), over caching textures and data, etc.. any way you slice it, it's causing issues for people who don't have a "killer machine"

Hell this isn't just happening on the PC.... it's doing it on the Ps3.. since that console has blue ray they shoved all these hi rez textures and the ps3 may look good but the performance is CRAP. Ps3 user suffer as bad or worse than some PC users

Now the xbox is limited to a 9.7GB dvd so they had to compress the textures. The game has little to no perf issues on the xbox, but doesn't look nearly as good on the PC/PS3

This game should have been QAed for 1-3 more months and beta tested by 10,000 people. This has to be one of THE most buggy first person game releases in history. I'd call it a nightmare of epic proportions LOL

Modifié par TallBearNC, 24 novembre 2009 - 07:00 .

[TallBearNC]

Even with graphics detail to LOW and Texture detail to low the game instantly loads up and reserves 1.2GB of virtual memory space and 600MB in it's private working set. with everything maxxed, it boots and loads a game with 1.4GB of cirtual memory space used and 700MB of private working set. on a system with 2GB of ram.. the instant reserving of 1.4GB of ram will INSTANTLY cause paging to happen. LOL...

I'm a a 64bit OS.. you should see those #s after 12 hrs of gameplay

over 2GB private working set and 3GB of virtual memory space used (it can do that because the game is large address aware) allowing it to use 4GB of ram on a 64 bit OS ... except that I have so much ram.. all that happens is my game runs faster and faster...


of course this doesn't help people with <6GB of ram.

Modifié par TallBearNC, 24 novembre 2009 - 07:07 .

[mrbrian200]

Takes me too long write my responses.... Thx TallBear with your explanation of how this game stores data I now understand why exit/reloading makes a difference. Does Bioware realize the relatively small fraction comprised of the most hardcore gamers who actually approach the amount of RAM installed for which their memory management scheme is designed? Seems an easy fix would be to have an options setting to flush cache data with each area for "machines with low amounts of ram". I don't know for sure how they would word that...I wouldn't have considered 4 GB to be lacking. To me low means 2 or less. Anything above 6GB of RAM I would have thought to be unnecessary for home use...at least until now.



So that would also mean the FR slowdown and unresponsive character interaction has to do with data that needs to be in RAM being cached on disk, effectively bringing the running process to a halt considering disk reads come at a snail's pace compared to RAM.

[serguxa]

TallBearNC wrote...

of course this doesn't help people with <6GB of ram.

I hope you are right, but i've seen some posts from people who have a hi-end PC with 12 GB of ram and also having this problem with loading times getting longer and longer.

[Neccrid]

If you have a AMD Phenom Quad Core CPU  try this out. 
http://www.hardwarec...our-phenom.html

So far this has worked for me.  Credit goes to Nujabes.  http://social.biowar...58/index/156838

[mrbrian200]

Titius.Vibius wrote...

TallBearNC wrote...

but anyway you look at it.. be it a leak.. or be it poor/improper, or overzealous texture caching.. BW needs to fix it

However *I* don't have a problem with it lol. My game runs faster and faster the longer I play.. it's almost like they made the game for an i7 or quad core system running a 64 bit OS with 6+ GB of ram... now if they based their design specs of that.. HUGE mistake and the requirements on the box and online should be much MUCH higher

You're not helping, instead making it more obvious that EA QA was in fact using monstrous i7 machines. LOL

Worse yet...those QA machines are likely leased: all mirror image identical.
Oh, somewhere in a back office there exists examples of an AMD, Core2 and P4 machine.   Nobody ever really goes in there unless the big boss is around.