RAM consumption in games has been generating a lot of questions lately, and I have to admit that I was affected by this problem after trying a few of the latest generation games that showed under the scrutiny of my performance measurement tools. increase RAM consumption.

I explain the key to the case in case someone gets lost. A game that requires 8 GB of RAM can work perfectly with so much memoryand stabilize with a total RAM consumption of about 7.7 GB. When used in a higher configuration, with 16 GB or even 32 GB of RAM, the game may have much higher memory consumption and register a steady increase. For example, it’s easy to find titles that start consuming 12 GB of RAM and that eventually In the end, they reach 16 GB of RAM without any problems.

God of War was one of the best examples in recent triple A releases that demonstrated this behavior, but it was not the only one, and in fact this problem of excessive memory consumption is not limited to RAM, it occurs in graphics memory. Why exactly does this happen and what consequences can it have for users?

RAM consumption and memory leak: Serious problem

Normally, when a game consumes more graphics memory than it actually needs, we face a simple precaution, meaning that the game behaves as if it were a cache and uses a component that you do not normally need to try to improve performance. Something similar can happen with RAM consumption, and we would have no problem if that consumption stabilized and continued to grow abnormally and disproportionately.

The problem arises when we face what is known as a “memory leak,” that is, before a memory leak, also known as a memory leak. This occurs when the game is unable to manage RAM properly. Under normal conditions, when the game does not need certain resources, it returns them and releases them so that they can be reused. This means that RAM is never saturated.

When a “memory leak” occurs, the game does not return the part of RAM that it no longer needs, and therefore not only is RAM not being reused, but it’s getting more and more full, until we reach a point where the system may be saturated, and eventually suffer a spontaneous shutdown or even crash of the computer.

Of course this problem it does not always have the same gravity. There are times when only a few megabytes are consumed from time to time, which means you don’t have serious stability or performance issues, even when we play for hours, especially if we have 32 GB of RAM, but in other cases this problem can occur in a much more aggressive way.

What can I do about this problem? Unfortunately nothing

And the reason is very simple, that in the end we face a problem that some specific games may suffer, and therefore this must be solved by its developers through the appropriate patch. Don’t be punished by thinking that it’s your team’s fault, because in fact it’s the other way around, it’s not a problem that is not the result of insufficient optimization, but poor programming.

Always keep in mind that not all games are developed in the same way and do not have the same capabilities when it comes to using the latest hardware. Some titles have a very careful graphics, but they scale fatally on multi-core processors, and others have serious image synchronization issues or even break. poor workload management.

You can have the most powerful PC in the world, though if the optimization is very poor, the performance will be adequate. If you have any questions about the consumption of RAM or graphics memory, you can leave them in the comments and we will help you solve them.