S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: New Vista patch reduces system crashes
If you are using Windows Vista and cannot enjoy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, because it is crashing constantly, you are not alone. Many new threads about crashes and system freezes appear in our technical forums every week.
Microsoft released a patch for Windows Vista (32 bit) on the recently arranged Patch Day, which aims to improve compatibility with 3D games and reduce system crashes. Especially S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is said to benefit from the hotfix and the number of crashes should be greatly decreased. As per Heise.de, similar to the Forceware driver which was released yesterday, the memory management is the problem, but in this case it's only concerning Vista 32 bit.
With Windows XP, all programs manage the used memory themselves, whereas under Vista the used memory is managed by the video memory manager and, due to a programming error, this can cause reduced performance or even crashes.
Quote (Heise.de):
"The reason for the error is the altered memory management of Vista, compared to Windows XP. 3D applications periodically copy the video memory content of the graphics card to the virtual memory of the system. By this, the video content of the program is preserved, if you alt+tab to another application and switch back again for example. Up to Windows XP, all programs manage this on their own, with Vista, this function is taken over by the video memory manager. To maintain compatibility, 3D applications are still able to manage copies by themselves."
"On a 32 bit system, 3D games which are addressing a big amount of memory, can cause the 2GB address space to overflow, because of the two video memory copies. A considerable decrease in performance or a crash of the application is the consequence. After applying the patch, the video memory manager of Vista checks if a copy was made by the application. If this is the case, it does not reserve memory for a system-side copy."
