Stalker Save and Quicksave crashes under Vista 32

I posted this over in the Stalker fourms, it was actually posted before and
Anandtech has an article that explains the issues and other games that might
have this issue

Vista Save and Quicksave (and maybe some others) Crash - Fix

I started playing Stalker under Vista32 again, as I was trying to do some
benchmarking and test. And I started getting the crash on Quicksaves. I
thought it was somehting I have changed, since I just played it for 4 hours
under Vista64.

I have 3GB of ram, but the Xray error logs report an "out of memory error".
But what it really means is out of Virtual memory.

Here is the Error you should see in the xray_username.log.

[error]Expression : fatal error
[error]Function : _out_of_memory
[error]File : D:xray-svnxrCorexrDebugNew.cpp
[error]Line : 358
[error]Description : <no expression>
[error]Arguments : Out of memory. Memory request: 8192 K

I was using Process Explorer to see what the program was doing and it was
only reporting 1.4GB of physical ram in use, but as you'll see in this
snapshot, the Virtual memory was just over 2GB.
http://images.filecloud.com/520231/out_of_memory.jpg

The reason the error is so random, is because not all the levels consume
that much space. In this case, Cordon and Army Warehouse are the two places
I can exceed 2GB. and fairly fast as you see the game was only running for 2
minutes when it maxed out. Which is why I could do 50 quicksaves, but 51
might crash. If you do the quicksave, while your under 2GB of virtual
memory, it's fine, do the quicksave after you exceed it and BAM ! CTD !

There are two fixes one has. Lower the textures and lighting or for Vista,
use the increaseuserVA switch. Which funny enough I had on before and took
it off (which explains why I didn't have this problem before)
The full command to run from an Elevated Command prompt (means run as admin)
is

bcdedit /Set IncreaseUserVa 3072

After adding this option back in, I can quicksave all I want when exceeding
2GB.

So far, I've not been able to get XP to exceed the 2GB virtual memory usage,
or at least I didn't quicksave during the times it did.

Here's an article about the 32bit OS 2GB virtual address limit.
http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3034

You can get process Explorer from Microsoft here
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx

Running an "elevated" command prompt (aka run as admin)
http://images1.filecloud.com/520296/...d_prompted.jpg

Yea, there is an article on Anandtech explaining this issue under Vista32.
It is caused by the effing DRM in Vista and has something to do with the
memory space it uses. I installed Stalker to Vista64 yesterday and won't
have this issue because it only happens on Vista32bit. I have 4gb ram
installed and all of it is addressable on Vista64. I have dual boot XP too
so always have that option. I'll tell you this. Anyone moving to Vista and
expecting good backwards compatibly can forget it. I can see myself dual
booting XP/Vista for a long time to come. If our games don't run properly on
the latest version of Windows then why do we need it? May as well get Linux
for free if it's going to be this way.

Hey stalker rocks. How do you quicksave though? I've finished the whole game
without it and it would have being quite helpful.

F6 to quicksave and I think it is F7 to load the quicksave.