ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 14:32:

If we move away from politics. […]
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If we move away from politics.

Yeah I think Ramageddon might be a chance for developers to start controlling the amount of memory they use once again.
I think that will be quite difficult for most because the libraries are now tuned to massive RAM usage.

You can for instance see how much things have changed in the dev community when you look at WinXP.
WinXP had a 32bit limit of 4Gb, and until SP2 it could use more than that up to 64Gb, but due to sloppy development of drivers Microsoft felt compelled to remove PAE usage of more than 4Gb which is why so many retro gamers build "Ultimate XP" systems with more than 4Gb of RAM but only see 3.xGb in System Properties. Because they use a Service Pack that disables its ability to use 4-64Gb RAM.
But the way WinXP used that "extra" RAM is not only misunderstood by most people it was also a problem in development teams at the time and thats what broke a good system.

A system might have 32Gb of RAM but the apps, programs etc can only access a small amount of it.
So in Win2k if an app calls for 2Gb it gets 2Gb and then when you start a new app that requires 2Gb it cant have it and you get swapping. The system has 4Gb but the app only gets access to 2Gb
Now thats not quite right, the numbers are wrong and it doesnt take into account user + kernel usage and limits etc but its good enough to describe how it essentially works, in that once you run out of RAM thats it you can only swap which slows the system down as it uses the HDD as virtual RAM. BUT more importantly it tells how a program cant soak up all the system RAM. It had a limit as to how much it could use regardless of how much was installed in the system in total.
These days that limit basically might as well not be there. if a system has 16Gb and Edge/Chrome wants it then it can have it.
Its like living in a house with rubber walls. They flex to accommodate the fact you want more space, but dont need more space.
Back in Win2k/WinXP there was a per app memory usage limit. The walls of the house were solid and once it reached it it got problematic and as your software slowed down due to excessive ram usage you as a dev were called out for it. Your app was slow, clunky and people stopped using it.

Now Im know there are the more technically guys here who will look at my numbers and say theyre wrong, and they would be right but the idea of what is going on is essentially correct. And it doesnt matter what the numbers really were back then, the fact is its basically how it worked, in that developers had good reasons to control the RAM usage of their programs. Which I think is going to become important and this is why.

Back in the 90s there was the DotCom bubble that everybody is recognising in this current AI craze.
The DoTComs grew, drove up prices and then once supply of hardware caught up with demand those DotComs saw there was no market, they had bills to pay and no real income from their investment and *poof* dead dotcom.
But the hardware they had while being enterprise level was in some way resellable to the retail market. It drove down the retail ram prices as those used items hit the market people had options and they took the cheaper one. So the manufacturers lowered prices to sell product.

But now the shortage of RAM and GPUs...
Once those AI companies burst the tech they are buying is highly specific in most cases. It cant be used in peoples home computers like the dead dotcom kit could be.
So there will be no, or very little glut in second hand kit...
How many of us would want an H100, or a GPU with no output... (geeks sure but geeks dont have the money to buy it all and lower the price of hardware, the gamers dont spend half as much money and have the effect on the market they like to think they do).
So the RAM doesnt flood the used market, storage might, but storage is a moot point for app development.
The RAM prices wont fall after this, because the trigger that makes them fall isnt there.

Its not like modern developers have done anything wrong, they have been working in the space they have to work in just like they did in the days of winxp, but now that space into which they are developing for is more open plan and their work has learnt to expand into it as unused system RAM is wasted system RAM. back in the day it wasnt like that.

But now I think things will have to change as systems with 8 and 16Gb of RAM will become normal and devs will need to limit their usage of a finite resource.

3.5Gb, 4Gb with PAE installed, moot point as even with PAE XP had issues addressing it perfectly when a GPU with more than 512Mb of Vram was installed in the system.

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 14:39:

3.5Gb, 4Gb with PAE installed, moot point as even with PAE XP had issues addressing it perfectly when a GPU with more than 512Mb of Vram was installed in the system.

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made.

No thats not quite right.
Its not that XP had issues addressing it.

If we are assuming PAE is installed, then we are talking about SP1a, or a system that does not have SP2 or SP3 as SP2 and higher could not use PAE even if it says it is using it it isnt.
Its a hard limit imposed by Microsoft, and there are technical reasons why we can go into later.

But the issues you say XP has that it does actually have come in the form of
The Chipset had to remap the displaced RAM correctly, the BIOS had to report the memory properly, the drivers had to tolerate DMA addresses above 4Gb.
The drivers were often the problem and why microsoft imposed the 4Gb hard limit on address space.
It wasnt the OS that had issues it was the platform.

I spent a long time looking into all this with XP after I installed XP onto a HP ProDesk 600 G1 DM a year or more ago and found little to no help here on the subject as it was uncharted territory. And as a result I bought and played with a lot of hardware that taught me a lot about XP and how it really works, as opposed to how most people think it works.

The opening words of your post tell me you know what youre talking about but at the same time you dont know what youre talking about.

With PAE installed, which is only actually available on SP1a and below then 4Gb of system RAM + a 1Gb graphics card can be seen and used but the motherboard also needs to support the remap, its not that XP has issues its that hardware and drivers need support too, which so many didnt people, like you, think the problems are normal.
Theyre not.
None of what you said is actually true, what you're describing are real problems people encountered, but they werent necessarily caused by XP itself, however it is in the wild as being true for various reasons to do with the problems having been seen and put down to the wrong cause because no root cause analysis was done to understand the problem.

I mean how many people do you know say XP cant address more than 4Gb of system RAM even with PAE enabled?
Even though a system with SP2 or SP3 say PAE is enabled but it cant be as it was removed by Microsoft and before SP2, so SP1a can address up to 64Gb of RAM but the hardware its running on also needs to support it as do drivers which isnt an XP limitation.

Law212 wrote on Today, 13:15:

Its a fact that dev teams are bloated with people with no technical knowledge.

i think that's a function of more and more complex systems - hardware and software, a kind of "brook's law" variant; communication and coordination costs grow faster than than the size of the "tech" scope itself. We don't need specific roles - just roles that in some way relate to that communication and coordination - analysts, project people, people who say words like samurai or epic without feeling silly, and then all the other roles needed to support those roles. in the end the actual number of technical people is smaller than all the non techs. Take them all away and it feels lean, but then some things go astray, some things aren't understood, so we bring in someone to look at that, and before you know it people are talking about "user stories" again and its all back!

Not that this is the reason for the cost of RAM, nor the reason for large commercial games being coded upon layers of interfaces and libraries with les emphasis on hardware optimisation

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:16:

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made. […]
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Trashbytes wrote on Today, 14:39:

3.5Gb, 4Gb with PAE installed, moot point as even with PAE XP had issues addressing it perfectly when a GPU with more than 512Mb of Vram was installed in the system.

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made.

No thats not quite right.
Its not that XP had issues addressing it.

If we are assuming PAE is installed, then we are talking about SP1a, or a system that does not have SP2 or SP3 as SP2 and higher could not use PAE even if it says it is using it it isnt.
Its a hard limit imposed by Microsoft, and there are technical reasons why we can go into later.

But the issues you say XP has that it does actually have come in the form of
The Chipset had to remap the displaced RAM correctly, the BIOS had to report the memory properly, the drivers had to tolerate DMA addresses above 4Gb.
The drivers were often the problem and why microsoft imposed the 4Gb hard limit on address space.
It wasnt the OS that had issues it was the platform.

I spent a long time looking into all this with XP after I installed XP onto a HP ProDesk 600 G1 DM a year or more ago and found little to no help here on the subject as it was uncharted territory. And as a result I bought and played with a lot of hardware that taught me a lot about XP and how it really works, as opposed to how most people think it works.

The opening words of your post tell me you know what youre talking about but at the same time you dont know what youre talking about.

With PAE installed, which is only actually available on SP1a and below then 4Gb of system RAM + a 1Gb graphics card can be seen and used but the motherboard also needs to support the remap, its not that XP has issues its that hardware and drivers need support too, which so many didnt people, like you, think the problems are normal.
Theyre not.
None of what you said is actually true, what you're describing are real problems people encountered, but they werent necessarily caused by XP itself, however it is in the wild as being true for various reasons to do with the problems having been seen and put down to the wrong cause because no root cause analysis was done to understand the problem.

I mean how many people do you know say XP cant address more than 4Gb of system RAM even with PAE enabled?
Even though a system with SP2 or SP3 say PAE is enabled but it cant be as it was removed by Microsoft and before SP2, so SP1a can address up to 64Gb of RAM but the hardware its running on also needs to support it as do drivers which isnt an XP limitation.

There are patches for WinXP SP3 to unlock PAE capability, allowing up to 64GB of RAM.

From my experience, most drivers apparently work fine with such patched system, namely last versions of AMD/nVidia drivers.

I already have positive results with big VRAM cards such as FirePro W9000 (6GB) and even Quadro K6000 (12GB). They work without issues on such environment, and they're of the last generations of cards to receive official support on XP.

The only thing that's giving me a headache was audio drivers. They can misbehave in many different flavors with a good amount of them leading to BSoDs. At least Realtek HDA drivers work okay.

LSS10999 wrote on Today, 15:53:

There are patches for WinXP SP3 to unlock PAE capability, allowing up to 64GB of RAM. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:16:

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made. […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 14:39:

3.5Gb, 4Gb with PAE installed, moot point as even with PAE XP had issues addressing it perfectly when a GPU with more than 512Mb of Vram was installed in the system.

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made.

No thats not quite right.
Its not that XP had issues addressing it.

If we are assuming PAE is installed, then we are talking about SP1a, or a system that does not have SP2 or SP3 as SP2 and higher could not use PAE even if it says it is using it it isnt.
Its a hard limit imposed by Microsoft, and there are technical reasons why we can go into later.

But the issues you say XP has that it does actually have come in the form of
The Chipset had to remap the displaced RAM correctly, the BIOS had to report the memory properly, the drivers had to tolerate DMA addresses above 4Gb.
The drivers were often the problem and why microsoft imposed the 4Gb hard limit on address space.
It wasnt the OS that had issues it was the platform.

I spent a long time looking into all this with XP after I installed XP onto a HP ProDesk 600 G1 DM a year or more ago and found little to no help here on the subject as it was uncharted territory. And as a result I bought and played with a lot of hardware that taught me a lot about XP and how it really works, as opposed to how most people think it works.

The opening words of your post tell me you know what youre talking about but at the same time you dont know what youre talking about.

With PAE installed, which is only actually available on SP1a and below then 4Gb of system RAM + a 1Gb graphics card can be seen and used but the motherboard also needs to support the remap, its not that XP has issues its that hardware and drivers need support too, which so many didnt people, like you, think the problems are normal.
Theyre not.
None of what you said is actually true, what you're describing are real problems people encountered, but they werent necessarily caused by XP itself, however it is in the wild as being true for various reasons to do with the problems having been seen and put down to the wrong cause because no root cause analysis was done to understand the problem.

I mean how many people do you know say XP cant address more than 4Gb of system RAM even with PAE enabled?
Even though a system with SP2 or SP3 say PAE is enabled but it cant be as it was removed by Microsoft and before SP2, so SP1a can address up to 64Gb of RAM but the hardware its running on also needs to support it as do drivers which isnt an XP limitation.

There are patches for WinXP SP3 to unlock PAE capability, allowing up to 64GB of RAM.

From my experience, most drivers apparently work fine with such patched system, namely last versions of AMD/nVidia drivers.

I already have positive results with big VRAM cards such as FirePro W9000 (6GB) and even Quadro K6000 (12GB). They work without issues on such environment, and they're of the last generations of cards to be officially supported on XP.

The only thing that's giving me a headache was audio drivers. They can misbehave in many different flavors with a good amount of them leading to BSoDs. At least Realtek HDA drivers work okay.

BITD, I frequently encountered vendor-orphaned HDA CODEC drivers that would not enable if system memory was greater than 3gb, because windows would not remap the PCI BAR, and the audio drivers were hardcoded to 32bit address space, despite being 64bit flavor otherwise.

It was a royal PITA.

I cant imagine the situation being *better* without a generic HDA CODEC driver made by the retro community.

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm.
Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig.
Consumer chipsets didn't even have address lines for more than 4gb until the... g35? chipset ~5 years later.

Oh noes their consumer os didn't work very well with something that didn't exist outside of $5m+ supercomputer clusters.

LSS10999 wrote on Today, 15:53:

There are patches for WinXP SP3 to unlock PAE capability, allowing up to 64GB of RAM. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 15:16:

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made. […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 14:39:

3.5Gb, 4Gb with PAE installed, moot point as even with PAE XP had issues addressing it perfectly when a GPU with more than 512Mb of Vram was installed in the system.

Yeah I guessed I would get somebody like you trying to flex their tech knowledge rather than address the point made.

No thats not quite right.
Its not that XP had issues addressing it.

If we are assuming PAE is installed, then we are talking about SP1a, or a system that does not have SP2 or SP3 as SP2 and higher could not use PAE even if it says it is using it it isnt.
Its a hard limit imposed by Microsoft, and there are technical reasons why we can go into later.

But the issues you say XP has that it does actually have come in the form of
The Chipset had to remap the displaced RAM correctly, the BIOS had to report the memory properly, the drivers had to tolerate DMA addresses above 4Gb.
The drivers were often the problem and why microsoft imposed the 4Gb hard limit on address space.
It wasnt the OS that had issues it was the platform.

I spent a long time looking into all this with XP after I installed XP onto a HP ProDesk 600 G1 DM a year or more ago and found little to no help here on the subject as it was uncharted territory. And as a result I bought and played with a lot of hardware that taught me a lot about XP and how it really works, as opposed to how most people think it works.

The opening words of your post tell me you know what youre talking about but at the same time you dont know what youre talking about.

With PAE installed, which is only actually available on SP1a and below then 4Gb of system RAM + a 1Gb graphics card can be seen and used but the motherboard also needs to support the remap, its not that XP has issues its that hardware and drivers need support too, which so many didnt people, like you, think the problems are normal.
Theyre not.
None of what you said is actually true, what you're describing are real problems people encountered, but they werent necessarily caused by XP itself, however it is in the wild as being true for various reasons to do with the problems having been seen and put down to the wrong cause because no root cause analysis was done to understand the problem.

I mean how many people do you know say XP cant address more than 4Gb of system RAM even with PAE enabled?
Even though a system with SP2 or SP3 say PAE is enabled but it cant be as it was removed by Microsoft and before SP2, so SP1a can address up to 64Gb of RAM but the hardware its running on also needs to support it as do drivers which isnt an XP limitation.

There are patches for WinXP SP3 to unlock PAE capability, allowing up to 64GB of RAM.

From my experience, most drivers apparently work fine with such patched system, namely last versions of AMD/nVidia drivers.

I already have positive results with big VRAM cards such as FirePro W9000 (6GB) and even Quadro K6000 (12GB). They work without issues on such environment, and they're of the last generations of cards to receive official support on XP.

The only thing that's giving me a headache was audio drivers. They can misbehave in many different flavors with a good amount of them leading to BSoDs. At least Realtek HDA drivers work okay.

I know.
But if we are talking about just basic WinXP as provided by Microsoft then it doesnt.
Its my experience too with drivers as I also use the latest drivers, but back when it was current then a lot of drivers did break the system and thats why the changes were made.
Microsoft didnt spend money fixing a problem nobody had. Hell they take an ice age to fix problems people do have so your comment is on point up to a point but that doesnt take away at all from what I said.
The drivers were terrible then and were causing problems and the fix was to remove >4Gb RAM.

I went along the Titan Xp route in my system but the Quadro K6000 is the same for what were talking about. They have now drivers written that takes the "problems" into account and writes drivers that work.
Sound is another matter.
Sound drivers are a mystery to me. I have a system with an ADI sound chip and it wont use the ADI drivers it will only use VIA drivers!
I stay on basics with sound.

myne wrote on Today, 16:06:

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm. Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig. Consumer chipsets didn't even have addr […]
Show full quote

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm.
Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig.
Consumer chipsets didn't even have address lines for more than 4gb until the... g35? chipset ~5 years later.

Oh noes their consumer os didn't work very well with something that didn't exist outside of $5m+ supercomputer clusters.

*BooM*
Exactly that.
That is exactly where I got to on the systems I was building. I was maxing out the RAM in a Win98 system to 1Gb and it was causing no end of problems on that particular system, I didnt understand it as I have another system that does use 1Gb RAM and its fine. The platform is the problem.

Then we come to WinXP.
4Gb of RAM was MASSIVE! I had a lot at 1Gb in mine and I only had that because I worked for a component distributer so I got it wholesale prices. But the idea of sticking more than 4Gb of RAM into a system that runs XP is a modern thing, and its a modern idea to load systems up to the max and then only because of the prices.

In these cases, the address lines were very much present, due to >4gb RAM being addressable with a different OS. (WITHOUT PAE)

The issue was MS not remapping the BAR, and driver makers/oems not wanting to bother with 'legacy' things.

ElectroSoldier wrote on Today, 16:11:

The drivers were terrible then and were causing problems and the fix was to remove >4Gb RAM.

The latest Radeon Catalyst iCafe 2015 XP driver still broke things like that. I wanted to compile Mame and it went over 2 GB memory usage. Booted with the /3GB switch. That worked for the mentioned purpose, but then all game 3D acceleration craps out, until rebooted without /3GB. Don't remember if Realtek sound was also affected.

myne wrote on Today, 16:06:

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm. Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig. Consumer chipsets didn't even have addr […]
Show full quote

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm.
Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig.
Consumer chipsets didn't even have address lines for more than 4gb until the... g35? chipset ~5 years later.

Oh noes their consumer os didn't work very well with something that didn't exist outside of $5m+ supercomputer clusters.

And Vista had a requirement of only 512mB of RAM. Both of those OSes ran like poo with the low amount of RAM.

XP is generally trash below 1GB of RAM even for regular office type unless you like your HDD to constantly be thrashed with swap file usage.

2GB is ok-ish, but I always had at least 3GB and usually 4 even if only 3.5GB was useable.

Then I moved to XP x64 before Vista.

PAE was a joke even when it was a thing. It usually didn't work at all.

Windows XP 32-bit limits processes to 2GB unless built with laa (Large Address Aware, which is a compiler flag), in which (as an app) you can access 3GB, no more. If you want/need more within a single process, you have to use file memory mapping, not RAM (which is kinda application version of using a swap file). Swapping, RAM mapping (address translation) etc is all handled by the OS since we have something called protected memory, and have done for a number of decades now.

The PAE was only really useful for server/enterprise grade since it allowed multiple processes (which used say 2GB), not allowing a single process to use > 2GB (3GB with laa), so irrelevant for 'devs' unless they were implementing multiple processes and handling inter-process communication themselves (but each process was still limited to 2GB... or 3GB with laa).

This limitation was lifted for 64-bit windows which are no longer limited to 2GB process (it is an internal OS limitation, you would have to ask MS why they chose this limit for 32-bit Windows).

cyclone3d wrote on Today, 17:39:

And Vista had a requirement of only 512mB of RAM. Both of those OSes ran like poo with the low amount of RAM. […]
Show full quote

myne wrote on Today, 16:06:

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm. Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig. Consumer chipsets didn't even have addr […]
Show full quote

When xp was released, 256mb was the norm.
Servers were the only ones pushing past a gig.
Consumer chipsets didn't even have address lines for more than 4gb until the... g35? chipset ~5 years later.

Oh noes their consumer os didn't work very well with something that didn't exist outside of $5m+ supercomputer clusters.

And Vista had a requirement of only 512mB of RAM. Both of those OSes ran like poo with the low amount of RAM.

XP is generally trash below 1GB of RAM even for regular office type unless you like your HDD to constantly be thrashed with swap file usage.

2GB is ok-ish, but I always had at least 3GB and usually 4 even if only 3.5GB was useable.

Then I moved to XP x64 before Vista.

PAE was a joke even when it was a thing. It usually didn't work at all.

Even XP home was rarely packaged with less than 512mb at launch, it was just another forced upgrade that made lots of older super 7 and even p2 class equipment obsolete because you could really fit enough ram not to thrash.

Win2k on the other hand usually ran fine on 256mb in base form