The OFFICIAL Anandtech Forums TeS V: Skyrim Thread

[Merad]

Umm, didnt Skyrim ALWAYS require Steam, even the disc version?
How is anything different?

After Steam decrypted the game game files you could directly launch TESV.exe without opening Steam. Now you can't.

Edit:

Nope, there were ways to run the game without steam if you had the retail physical copy.

Worked for any copy. Even with a retail box version the game files should be encrypted until you connect to Steam.

 

[Anteaus]

Umm, didnt Skyrim ALWAYS require Steam, even the disc version?
How is anything different?

From what I understand is that it now requires the Steam client running when you start the game.

Ironically, I never thought to try launching without the client up. I just always started the client first and launched from there. That's the Steam tax.

 

[AMDZen]

Steam launches with my computer and is always running all the time. 90+% of people probably have steam always running so 90+% of people aren't going to notice this or care.

 

[ManBearPig]

okie dokie, im finally understanding enchanting, but ive got one or two final questions...

How do you know how much better the enchantment will be with grand over common or big or petty? Do i have to save/reload or will it tell me before i enchant?

 

[cytoSiN]

From what I understand is that it now requires the Steam client running when you start the game.

Ironically, I never thought to try launching without the client up. I just always started the client first and launched from there. That's the Steam tax.

I looked for (and found) the workaround on launch day because of the (over)use of the tab key in Skyrim's interface. Shift+Tab accesses the Steam menu (yes, you can disable this, but that's just one more thing to remember to do). It popped up way too often in my first couple of hours so I started experimenting with the different executables. Glad I did. This way, Steam wasn't able to ninja-patch my executable since I haven't launched it in over a week. Of course, we're going to have go along with it once Bethesda actually patches the game, since I'm sure all future patches will include this nonsense...

 

[cytoSiN]

okie dokie, im finally understanding enchanting, but ive got one or two final questions...

How do you know how much better the enchantment will be with grand over common or big or petty? Do i have to save/reload or will it tell me before i enchant?

It tells you in the enchanting interface before you "craft."

 

[Merad]

okie dokie, im finally understanding enchanting, but ive got one or two final questions...

How do you know how much better the enchantment will be with grand over common or big or petty? Do i have to save/reload or will it tell me before i enchant?

If you select the item and enchantment first, then selecting different soul gems will update the stats on the right side for the final product.

 

[Rilo]

Correlation != causation, placebo, etc.

Revert back to your unmodified exe. Play the game. Do you see memory usage getting close to 2GB? No? Then LAA is having no effect whatsoever on the program.

Well, what do you think might have happened, then? I understand that anecdotal evidence isn't scientifically valid. I saw people arguing what you've said before applying the fix, and I honestly was skeptical when I applied it... I just thought I'd give it a shot because I got tired of crashing every single time I played the game.

Then I tried it. Didn't do anything else to the game, but from that moment on I haven't crashed once, and the texture issues I got every single time I played completely vanished. If I did nothing else but try the "fix" that supposedly does nothing, then what happened?

I truly understand what you're saying, but something happened that took my game from obviously borked to no hitches whatsoever from that instance of trying LAA.

 

[Anteaus]

I looked for (and found) the workaround on launch day because of the (over)use of the tab key in Skyrim's interface. Shift+Tab accesses the Steam menu (yes, you can disable this, but that's just one more thing to remember to do). It popped up way too often in my first couple of hours so I started experimenting with the different executables. Glad I did. This way, Steam wasn't able to ninja-patch my executable since I haven't launched it in over a week. Of course, we're going to have go along with it once Bethesda actually patches the game, since I'm sure all future patches will include this nonsense...

Lol ninja patch. You can disable the autopatch function on a game by game basis in the event you want to keep Steam from mucking them up. I had to do this with some games because for whatever reason the patch system kept breaking them, requiring an integrity check.

Edit Add: In theory you can do this to all of your games and only allow updates when your ready.

 

[cytoSiN]

Not to derail your discussion, but I believe that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has all of the answers here. Behold:

Correlation != causation, placebo, etc.

Well, what do you think might have happened, then? I understand that anecdotal evidence isn't scientifically valid.

 

[OCNewbie]

I've still only had one true CTD (was in a dungeon, and poof, was at desktop; no error messages).

Back to game content. Has anybody else encountered a glowing ball of light (approx basketball-size) upon entering an area? No spoilers, please.

 

[RebelCapitalist]

Steam launches with my computer and is always running all the time. 90+% of people probably have steam always running so 90+% of people aren't going to notice this or care.

Like me. Some reasons I like Steam are I don't need to have icons cluttering my desktop, don't need to remember where stuff is installed and don't need to navigate menus to play a game.

Back to Skyrim, I just installed that large memory mod. Can't wait to play later to see if it smooths anything out.

 

[Rilo]

Like me. Some reasons I like Steam are I don't need to have icons cluttering my desktop, don't need to remember where stuff is installed and don't need to navigate menus to play a game.

Back to Skyrim, I just installed that large memory mod. Can't wait to play later to see if it smooths anything out.

Actually, they just released a small patch/hotfix that replaces the TESV.EXE so that the LAA no longer works (for those who swore it did).

 

[cytoSiN]

Question regarding level and perk caps. Forgive me if this is addressed elsewhere in this thread (I searched and only found passing reference). My friend google informs me that once you hit level 50, leveling slows down tremendously, but you can still max every skill to 100, thereby getting your character level over 70. My character is level 40, and I'm trying to plan out the rest of my perks. Can anyone at level 50 (or higher) confirm/deny that you still get perks after level 50, even if those levels are much harder to attain? Thanks!

 

[dennilfloss]

Not basketball but I did encounter a baseball-sized ball of light in a barrow on the northern coast. It kept multiplying until the end of the dungeon. Harmless except very annoying (distracting).

 

[Anteaus]

At level 50 you would have had 500 individual ability levelups. Yowzers

 

[homercles337]

Just flipping the LAA switch in the executable won't cause the program to use more memory anyway. Skyrim, in fact, doesn't come close to 2GB to begin with. During all my testing last week I was watching memory usage, never saw anything higher than 1.3 GB.

I don't bother arguing with people about it anymore tho. Lots of people love to drink the LAA kool aid.

What a load of rubbish. I have enabled the large addressable memory "mod" and both my 1GB cards are maxed, plus whatever the app is using in system memory. I will look later, but i would wager it is near 3GB total.

 

[Threefiddie]

the fact is it works. high rez textures without LAA you cannot fast travel it will ctd everytime. with the LAA you can fast travel. I've tested this removing the high rez textures and reinstalling disabling you name it. LAA does something

with new exe just delete it. go back to old exe and run LAA again and boom you have skyrim with high res texture mods working as intended

 

[Anteaus]

What a load of rubbish. I have enabled the large addressable memory "mod" and both my 1GB cards are maxed, plus whatever the app is using in system memory. I will look later, but i would wager it is near 3GB total.

He is referring to the main program, not to whatever textures are loaded into your GPU memory. It may be possible that the mod causes the game to shove more textures onto your cards for quicker access, but it doesn't do anything for the main app.

How does your GPU memory load compare with and without the mod? Also, how do you know that you aren't getting redundant textures loaded into your gpus? I'm not doubting that you see what you see, but there are technical consideration as to how the mod works in relation to how the OS deals with memory in addition to the fact that Skyrim's average texture resolution really shouldn't be pushing your GPUs from a memory standpoint unless something wierd is going on. Note I'm talking about vanilla Skyrim (no gameplay/hires mods).

Games like this use texture repetition to keep the memory load way down. I highly doubt you have 2GB of descrete textures loaded in there at one time unless something is astray.

There may definitely be a bug in the memory system that this mod helps avoid though, so you may be right about it working, regardless of how it does it.

 

[Punter]

Reading reports that even if steam auto-updates are turned off the .exe is still changed to the new DRM'd version.

 

[austin316]

why does it matter if you have to run the game from Steam? Seems like a good idea to me since it will limit piracy and give more money to Bethesda to continue to create such great games.

 

[Rilo]

Reading reports that even if steam auto-updates are turned off the .exe is still changed to the new DRM'd version.

Yeah, mine was turned off, but it still updated. Then when I went to check, it was set back to auto-update.

As stated above, it seems you can still put back the old exe if you made a copy of it. The new one was doing weird stuff to my menus, and I had NOT tried to apply the LAA to it.

 

[Locut0s]

From wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

"
Ability to run existing 32-bit applications (.exe programs) and dynamic link libraries (.dlls) using WoW64. Furthermore, a 32-bit program, if it was linked with the "large address aware" option,[52] can use up to 4 GB of virtual address space in 64-bit Windows, instead of the default 2 GB (optional 3 GB with /3GB boot option and "large address aware" link option) offered by 32-bit Windows.[56] Unlike the use of the /3GB boot option on x86, this does not reduce the kernel-mode virtual-address space available to the operating system. 32-bit applications can therefore benefit from running on x64 Windows even if they are not recompiled for x86-64.
"

Sounds to me like it will help if you have 64bit ver of Windows.

 

[Locut0s]

Wow the Bethesda PC forums have EXPLODED over this. lol.

 

[OCNewbie]

why does it matter if you have to run the game from Steam? Seems like a good idea to me since it will limit piracy and give more money to Bethesda to continue to create such great games.

Because it will eventually get cracked, and thus only the paying customers will be the ones who have to run Steam. Requiring Steam to run the game just makes it a little more challenging for the hackers to do what they do; that's all.