Does anyone know with absolute certainty if enb Videomemorysizemb is capped at 10240?

[drunken toad]

I've been using enb for years, but I always felt like I never optimized it quite right. I recently got a new rig and am trying to get everything working as best as possible. I was wondering if this parameter is an old limitation or if it still applies today.

I'm playing on Skyrim LE. Boris vramtest tool is telling me I have 32288 mb available for use on dx9. Could anyone shed some light on this? Also I'm using windows 11 and there is nothing on step about enb with windows 11, I know for windows 10 whatever number the tool gave you would subtract 350 or something like that.

[CHAOS30]

29 minutes ago, drunken toad said:

I've been using enb for years, but I always felt like I never optimized it quite right. I recently got a new rig and am trying to get everything working as best as possible. I was wondering if this parameter is an old limitation or if it still applies today.

I'm playing on Skyrim LE. Boris vramtest tool is telling me I have 32288 mb available for use on dx9. Could anyone shed some light on this? Also I'm using windows 11 and there is nothing on step about enb with windows 11, I know for windows 10 whatever number the tool gave you would subtract 350 or something like that.

Take this response with a grain of salt because it's been a while since I read anything about this topic, but here goes:
That memsize cap you are talkting about was a dx9 bug on any windows os higher than 7. That got fixed some years ago and all your memory should be accessible. I also think to remember that boris didn't want to support windows 11, so I don't know what the current situation is with that.

No idea about the exact numbers, but that tool from boris calculates vram + ram - some offset. I personally only use my vram for the enb setting and leave normal ram out of it. This might make problems if you don't have enough vram

Edited February 18, 2023 by CHAOS30

[drunken toad]

Thank you, this helps. I couldn't find anything solid about the topic within the last three years

[Grey Cloud]

None of that is particularly good advice.

 

1 hour ago, CHAOS30 said:

That memsize cap you are talkting about was a dx9 bug on any windows os higher than 7

Wrong. The 'mem size cap' as you call it was/is a limitation of 32-bit LAA and is nothing to do with the OS per se.

 

ENB uses RAM not VRAM so you are effectively handicapping your ENB by restricting it to 8GB(?) of RAM.

 

https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/Guide:ENBSeries

 

https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/SkyrimLE:ENBLocal_INI_Reference

 

==========================

 

As far as the W11 issue, I'd just go with the W10 settings.

I seem to recall that there is a max VideoMemorySizeMb but I don't think it is critical. In fact I'm pretty sure you can just leave it blank and whatever is needed will be used. I think you would probably have to change AutodetectVideoMemorySize to true if you choose to do this.

 

FWIW my (W10, 32GB RAM, 8GB VRAM) enblocal.ini settings were:

 

[MEMORY]
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true
DisableDriverMemoryManager=false
DisablePreloadToVRAM=false
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false
ReservedMemorySizeMb=256
VideoMemorySizeMb=24262
EnableCompression=false
AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Grey Cloud

[CHAOS30]

On 2/18/2023 at 9:36 PM, Grey Cloud said:

None of that is particularly good advice.

 

Wrong. The 'mem size cap' as you call it was/is a limitation of 32-bit LAA and is nothing to do with the OS per se.

 

ENB uses RAM not VRAM so you are effectively handicapping your ENB by restricting it to 8GB(?) of RAM.

 

https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/Guide:ENBSeries

 

https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/SkyrimLE:ENBLocal_INI_Reference

 

==========================

 

As far as the W11 issue, I'd just go with the W10 settings.

I seem to recall that there is a max VideoMemorySizeMb but I don't think it is critical. In fact I'm pretty sure you can just leave it blank and whatever is needed will be used. I think you would probably have to change AutodetectVideoMemorySize to true if you choose to do this.

 

FWIW my (W10, 32GB RAM, 8GB VRAM) enblocal.ini settings were:

 

[MEMORY]
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true
DisableDriverMemoryManager=false
DisablePreloadToVRAM=false
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false
ReservedMemorySizeMb=256
VideoMemorySizeMb=24262
EnableCompression=false
AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

 

I'm not familiar with LAA, but because of this:

Quote

Windows 8/8.1 users: Microsoft has, unintentionally, introduced a memory limit for DirectX 9 games/software. This limit is 4GBs (4096) and there is nothing which can be done to circumvent this limit. For users seeing the VRamSizeTest tool reporting 4064 or similar, this is not a mistake. This is actually the limit for the OS in use and the maximum value you can set the VideoMemorySizeMb to. This bug was fixed for Windows 10 in the 2017 Fall Creator's Update, but still affects Windows 8/8.1.

from https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/SkyrimLE:ENBLocal_INI_Reference/Memory I understood it as a dx9 bug which was appering depending on the OS. The deeper reason for this could be LAA as you said, I'm not familiar enough with that topic to make my own opinion. But I don't think I said anything wrong about this, I could still be misunderstanding somethin of course.


From the same source there is also this:

Quote

This sets the total memory that will be used for the ENBoost dynamic memory allocation. All available VRAM, except for the amount set with ReservedMemorySizeMb, will be used first, and if VideoMemorySizeMb is set to a value higher than total VRAM of the user's videocard, then ENBoost will use system RAM, if necessary, by running instances of enbhost.exe.

And from your own first source:

Quote

1. using available VRAM on your video card and then...
2. using system RAM for dynamically allocated cached data via a helper executable.

   This is accomplished by running one or more instances of an executable named enbhost.exe, which adds up to another ~3GB of memory available per instance.

So enb only using ram seams to be wrong.
The handicapping part is probaply true, but I got 11GB vram and never saw it get used over 7GB. My reasoning for not setting the VideoMemorySizeMb over the actuall vram was latency. Swapping files from gpu->cpu->ram and back sounded relativly expensive. But if that only happens when vram is full, then there is no reason to not set it higher.

Edited February 20, 2023 by CHAOS30

[Grey Cloud]

1 hour ago, CHAOS30 said:

But I don't think I said anything wrong about this, I could still be misunderstanding somethin of course.

No. It's my mistake as we were talking about two different things. I've never used W8 so I was unaware of that one.

 

1 hour ago, CHAOS30 said:

So enb only using ram seams to be wrong.

enbhost.exe uses the RAM when the VRAM runs out which only happens on a heavily modded game. If you have 11GB of VRAM then you probably do not run out of VRAM. If your, or anyone else's, game never runs out of VRAM then enbhost has no need to kick in.