Vole issues forth gaming hotfix

MICROSOFT has emanated a "hot fix" that claims to fix a stability problem in Vista systems used for heavy gaming.

The patch, issued under the heading of 'Virtual address space usage in Windows game development' and carrying the I-am-not-a-number of 940105, is here. It weighs in at around 70MB, with the majority of the package comprising a new DirectX graphics kernel.

The problem the Vole is addressing occurs where games overflow the amount of virtual address space they are allocated. On a 32-bit machine, games get around 2GB of resource space. Since many games copy the entire contents of the graphics card memory to the virtual address space, and graphics cards are now coming in massive memory sizes (512MB, 1GB etc) this leaves precious little room for anything else going on.

Of course, should the game run out of virtual space, it should fail gracefully. But, of course, that doesn't always happen.

Whilst DX10 games have changed the way such virtual addresses are used, running DX9 games on Vista with well-endowed graphics cards can still trigger the issue. The new hotfix changes the way that Vista handles such applications, ensuring that they don't fill up video memory quite so quickly. However, the chap writing the entirely confusing tech spec for the hotfix does issue a warning - regardless of this patch, games and other applications are swiftly running up against the 2GB limit for application addressing, and the only way to fix that in the long term, hotfixes aside, is to move to 64-bit.

So, if you've got a graphics accelerator with a tonne of memory and have been finding Vista a little flakey for DX9 gaming, go grab the patch and let us know how it works out for you. µ