If you’ve ever modded the older GTA games
before, you’ve probably ran into an issue like this, especially when installing higher
quality textures. This issue appears when the game hasn’t
got enough memory for streaming in the game world, which causes LOD models to appear instead
of the higher quality models it’s meant to show close to the player. This is usually solved by installing some
sort of mod that increases the memory the game can use for streaming. Usually limit adjusters can do this, such
as Open Limit Adjuster, but there’s plenty of options out there that allow you to tweak
the games streaming memory limit. So, while it seems simple. A lot of people don’t actually seem to understand
how streaming memory works and what the best limit is, so let’s go over it in this video. I’ll be using San Andreas in this video
as an example, but this applies to GTA III and Vice City as well. The older GTA games are 32bit applications,
which means by default, they can only use 2GB of system memory, also known as RAM. So out of that 2GB, they can only use a certain
amount of that RAM for streaming. Streaming is basically the loading in and
out of things in the game world, such as vehicles, pedestrians, map models, map textures, etc… It’s faster doing it this way. Instead of the game constantly having to load
individual files directly from your HDD or SSD. The game will instead load them into RAM,
which allows them to be quickly loaded when they’re needed. By default, San Andreas only allows a maximum
of 64MB of RAM to be used for streaming, which is very little when modding, considering some
mods like ROSA, have texture archives that can be around 28MB in size, which is nearly
half of your streaming memory budget gone from just one texture archive. Using mods like Open Limit Adjuster, we can
adjust how much memory the games can use for streaming. So for example, we can change the amount of
RAM the game can use for streaming to 500MB. When you first launch a new game while using
a heavy texture mod like ROSA along with a few other mods, the game could already be
using around 350MB out of that 500MB, just for streaming. As you play the game and stream more things
in and out of the game world, the streaming memory usage will continue to increase until
it reaches the 500MB limit that you’ve set. It won’t go down until it reaches the limit. Once the 500MB limit has been reached, only
then will the game start to unload files out of RAM and load new files into RAM. Once you reach the 500MB limit you’ve set
for streaming, the game will continue to hover around that limit until you restart the game. This can actually cause some stutters on slower
systems, the San Andreas mod Improved Streaming has several options to help alleviate this,
I’ll leave a link to it in the description. Keep in mind, the game will be using RAM for
other tasks too, if you look at Task Manager, you’ll see the game will be using even more
RAM. This will be the RAM used for streaming, and
also the RAM the game is using for other tasks, the same as any other application. The maximum amount of RAM you can set the
game to use for streaming memory is 2GB. However, like I said before, these games are
32bit applications, so they can only use 2GB of RAM in total. If you set the limit for streaming memory
to 2GB, the game won’t have enough RAM for other tasks. This will cause issues as you play, such as
pause menu textures not loading and other things in the game not working correctly,
eventually the game will crash once these issues start to appear. However, there is a patch that can increase
the amount of RAM these games can use, called LargeAddress. This basically enables a flag called “LargeAddressAware”
in the games executable, this flag allows 32bit applications to use more RAM. On 64bit systems, this will allow a 32bit
application to use 4GB of RAM. On 32bit systems, this will allow a 32bit
application to use 3GB of RAM. Although you will need to enable the 3GB switch
on your Windows installation if you’re on a 32bit version of Windows, I’ll leave a
link in the description below on how to do that. I’d always recommend using LargeAddress,
I’ll leave a link to it in the description. So if you have LargeAddress installed, the
game can now use more RAM. I have a 64bit system, so with LargeAddress,
my game can now use 4GB of RAM. Even though my game can now use 4GB of RAM,
the maximum I can allocate for streaming is still 2GB. However setting the streaming memory limit
to 2GB will no longer cause issues, as the game can use the other 2GB of RAM for other
tasks. 2GB is beyond what you’d ever need for these
games. So what would I recommend you set your streaming
memory limit to? It really depends on your situation. But this is what I’d generally go with. Install LargeAddress, so your game can use
more RAM. If you have 8GB of RAM, set the streaming
memory limit to 1GB. I personally use Open Limit Adjuster to adjust
the limit, as it supports GTA III and Vice City as well, however you can change the limit
with another mod if you like, such as the Fastman 92 Limit Adjuster or MixSets. If you have less than 8GB of RAM, set the
streaming limit to 500MB. This is so your system itself will have enough
RAM for other tasks. If you’re running into issues such as seeing
low quality models or textures up close, this generally means you need to increase the limit
gradually until the issue is solved. If you’re running into issues such as pause
menu textures not loading and then the game crashing right after, generally this means
the game hasn’t got enough RAM for other necessary tasks, so decrease the streaming
memory limit until the issue is solved. These issues won’t always be because of
the stream memory limit, but generally this is what will cause these issues. For San Andreas specifically, I’d also recommend
installing the mod Improved Streaming. This mod can reduce stutters and optimizes
the RAM usage of San Andreas overall. And that’s it for this video. Videos have been quite slow recently; however
I’ve been busy working on a new modding guide for San Andreas, which will hopefully
be finished in the next month or two. I made a community post on the channel last
month about what to expect in the guide and what’s next for the channel, so be sure
to check it out if you’re curious. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give
it a like. And don’t forget to subscribe to the channel
for more content like this.