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Memory access related CTD
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Description

Arma seems to struggle to handle 4K textures, leading to an eventual freezing of the game, and crash to desktop. It appears to be associated with the amount of virtual memory committed. The game seems to fill up as much VRAM and system RAM as it can, and after a point it starts hitting some limits. I don't see very high page file utilization but paged memory does increase. Notably the system doesn't actually run out of free memory in most cases, and page file doesn't get used by more than ~12%.

This particularly causes an issue with Global Mobilization assets with high texture size and quality. After a prolonged session in the 3DEN editor or if a lot of different assets are used, then the game eventually freezes and FPS falls to <5 fps. The UI is barely responsive. On stable branch this leads to a CTD, on performance/profiling branch this situation gets resolved after several minutes but can reoccur.

Increasing page file (and thus the virtual memory pool) alleviates teh issue to an extent but I'm not sure at what point it will stop occurring.

Details

Severity
Crash
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
Always
Operating System
Windows 10 x64
Operating System Version
2004
Category
Error Message
Steps To Reproduce

in eden editor open a new mission on:

  1. livionia - put down a lot of vehicles, take camera close so that LODs load

then open

  1. werferlingen - do the same. you could also load up the mission and fly around in helicopter a lot.

next open

  1. tanoa - repeat steps with assets. it will lead crash in editor. the map takes much longer to load textures and terrain objects than previous two.

you can copy-paste the same set of vehicles in each new map to make it easier.

Additional Information

System info:
i5 4690K @ 4.2GHz
16GB DDR3-1600 (dual channel)
GTX1660 Ti (6GB VRAM)
1TB M.2 SSD Intel 660p
Total allocated page file ~15GB

I have attached several crash dumps between April and August. They are all related to memory access issues, and as far as I remember all were somehow related to GM assets being loaded.

I am also uploading two excel workbooks with system data collected during the controlled test i did a couple of weeks ago. One corresponds to stable branch and the other to perf/profiling branch (perf binary). The last crash dump (from august) corresponds to the workbook with data from stable branch.



April log 1
April log 2
June
July
August

Event Timeline

GalComT added a subscriber: GalComT.Sep 2 2020, 3:52 PM
LSValmont added a subscriber: LSValmont.EditedSep 2 2020, 4:28 PM

Very detailed and in depth post SuicideKing! There should be indeed a way for the engine to unload no longer used textures to free up memory usage or another method to handle DLC assets without CTDs or performance degradation... Also, 4K textures are the norm now.

dedmen claimed this task.Sep 10 2020, 7:05 PM
dedmen added a subscriber: dedmen.

Man I love memory debugging (I don't, never done that. But I'm excited about having to do that :D)