Lyrium Memory Handler

Update: Apologies to the original researchers and creators of where lyrium started, I did not realize when i updated the last patch and the description, I did not carry forward the contribution markers, Again very sorry!

There is a reshade version and a no reshade version (reshade can be used with or without reshade just left them both up.)

LYRIUM MEMORY FIX

Dragon Age Origins is a 32 bit game, so it only has 2 gigabytes of address space to work with, or 4 gigabytes if you have applied the LAA patch. The longer you play, the more broken up that space becomes. Every texture the game loads needs one continuous block of memory, and once no block is large enough the game starts flickering textures and then crashes.

The important part is that the memory has not actually run out. In one captured crash there was 20 megabytes free, but it was split across roughly 430 separate gaps. The memory was there. It was just never in one piece.

It is also not a memory leak, even though that is what it is almost always called. Nothing is taken and never given back. The game creates a texture, uses it, releases it, and the memory comes back every single time. What does not come back is the shape of the free space, because the texture that fills a gap is never the same size as the one that left it. Over a session that grinds the free space into smaller and smaller pieces until nothing will fit.

This is why adding more RAM does not help, and why the LAA patch does not fix it either. The game never runs out of memory in the first place. LAA gives it a bigger area to grind through, which buys you time, and that is exactly why the usual advice is to save and restart every couple of hours. A fresh launch gets you a fresh unbroken memory space.

THE SECOND PROBLEM, WHICH IS NEW IN THIS VERSION

The engine also reserves one huge block for itself the moment it starts, and it carves everything it needs out of that block on its own. Windows never sees inside it.

That block grinds itself up in exactly the same way, and it is worse, because the pieces left behind never move. Over a session the biggest unbroken gap inside it only ever shrinks. On one test it started at 508 megabytes and fell to 73.

The engine needs 71. 6 megabytes in one piece for its largest job. Once the biggest gap drops below that, the engine does not crash and it does not warn you. It quietly gives up on whatever it was loading and carries on.

That is what an empty Denerim market is. It is a cutscene that never triggers, scenery that is missing, characters that never spawn. It looks exactly like a broken mod or a bad load order, which is why people have been chasing it for years without finding it. Nothing reports an error because nothing is ever actually attempted.

WHAT IT DOES

Normally the game keeps a full second copy of every texture in tha