FSX on Vista Ultimate x64 memory issue

[Iron Feliks]

I have had a number of instances of this error:

"Your computer has run out of available memory. Please restart Flight
Simulator and select different graphics, scenery or traffic settings."

Computer specs:

AMD Athlon x2 4600+
4 GB RAM
EVGA 8800GTX
HDD 1.44 TB (total)
1 KW PSU

Those specs are well above those recommended by MS. Can someone please tell
me how I am running out of memory? This did not happen on XP.

 

[Dale M. White]

Wonder if it's a Vista problem or a Vista64 problem. There are some post
below with the same issue. They are also running the 8800 series card, which
might be the issue, maybe with the drivers leaking or something.

If you had a 2nd monitor, you could bring up perfmon or resource manager and
see how much memory was actually in use.

You could look at total memory usage under Taskmanager and see what it shows
as max memory used, and if it's way below the 4GB you have.

 

[Iron Feliks]

Wonder if it's a Vista problem or a Vista64 problem. There are some post
below with the same issue. They are also running the 8800 series card,
which might be the issue, maybe with the drivers leaking or something.

If you had a 2nd monitor, you could bring up perfmon or resource manager
and see how much memory was actually in use.

You could look at total memory usage under Taskmanager and see what it
shows as max memory used, and if it's way below the 4GB you have.

I have a sidebar monitor that shows both memory usage and CPU usage.The RAM
usage is a bit over half of the amount available. Shortly before the
problem occurs, both cores of the CPU go to 100%. The question in my mind
is, does the message refer to system RAM or graphics memory?

 

[Dale M. White]

Well, that was the other theory we had the last time is that maybe it's a
Vide card memory issue, Still think it could be leaky driver or it's not
release memory like it should. One would think it would pass off to system
ram, what it couldn't hold in Video, but maybe that's where the bug is.

Since Doom3 has that Ultra mode, meant for video card with 512MB of ram,
maybe I should go back and play it a while and see if it ever gives a low
memory error.

 

[Iron Feliks]

Well, that was the other theory we had the last time is that maybe it's a
Vide card memory issue, Still think it could be leaky driver or it's not
release memory like it should. One would think it would pass off to system
ram, what it couldn't hold in Video, but maybe that's where the bug is.

Since Doom3 has that Ultra mode, meant for video card with 512MB of ram,
maybe I should go back and play it a while and see if it ever gives a low
memory error.

I have found a temporary solution, running FSX on Vista x64 with the
8800GTX. I simply changed the last ingredient in the resolution from x32 to
x16. Not much difference in appearance and I could not produce the out of
memory error, no matter what torture test I tried.

 

[Guest]

Do you have virtual memory turned off? Even 4 GB of ram can get used up
rather fast with today's games and op systems. I've got 3 GB and if I shut
down virtual memory it can get eaten up. After the op system and any other
programs running in the background take their bite you don't have nearly as
much memory available as you sometimes think. Just a thought.

 

[Dale M. White]

Another user posted that running it in 16bit color instead of 32bit seems to
have fixed the problem. Makes sense in a way. I'm guessing it's a bug with
the nVdia drivers and the 8800 series

 

[MBO]

I encountered out of memory errors with FSX. I finally traced it to a small
Readyboost cache on my flash drive. It was only 1 GB. I needed to use a
larger flash drive (with 4 GB) or no flash drive and use the regular Windows
Vista virtual memory. By either removing the smaller Readyboost flash drive
or turning off Readyboost, the problem went away until I got a larger flash
drive.

 

[MBO]

Update: You need to completely remove the Readyboost drive to eliminate this
error. Even one with a larger cache won't stop these problems.