[WH4K]

Originally Posted by TorpX

What is the 4GB patch and what exactly does it do?

There really needs to be a sticky explaining the hows and whys of the "4GB patch." I think it applies to SH3 as well as SH4, although I haven't tried it with SH3 yet. I'll take a stab at explaining.

The "4GB patch" is a nifty utility written by a Daniel Pistelli, who offers it for download at his website, NTCore (http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php).

The patch allows 32-bit applications (which both SH3 and SH4 are) to use up to 4GB RAM when run on a 64-bit OS, such as Windows 7 or Vista 64-bit.

Formerly, 32-bit apps could only use 2GB max, regardless of how much was actually available.

It's a bit unclear what the 4GB patch does for me, because I only have 4GB total. After applying the patch, I did not see SH4's RAM use climb higher than about 1.6 GB. So I'm not sure what the deal is. The patch may not be responsible for the apparent increase I've seen in SH4's stability.

Many of the fan mods cause SH4 to use much more RAM than it was originally intended to require. So anything we can do to let it have more RAM may be of benefit. I'm just not sure how this applies in my case, since I only have 4GB RAM.