Quote:
Originally Posted by WH4K
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.
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I've been doing some research on this 4GB patch. It seems there have been other, similar apps in the past, including an adjustment in Windows and mentioned on the Microsoft website. It would seem that the consensus of users claim no increase in performace. There are some who claim it helps but they seem to be more a product of the Placebo Effect. In fact, from what I've dug up, anything that purports to allow 4GB of memory in a 32 bit app (regardless of 32 or 64 bit systems) is questionable. There's also some info that these patches involve hacking the Windows Kernel and may leave your system open to exploits. I've also delved into some forums and read what the users of these type of patches write. Though a lot of them claim to have experienced no problems with these patches, they also claim either no noticeable improvement or haven't even bothered to check, benchmark, etc. In essence, they're using these patches blindly simply because someone created them, and/or, says they work.
The whole point to this is that one should thoroughly research any patches to be installed in their PC and hopefully, no one installs it simply on the strength of an unknown who posted the patch.
