[SOLVED] My PC is not using more than 4 GB RAM for games

[kacsa071]

I have 16 GBs of DDR4 RAM, and when I play GTA V for example, I can see that my computer is only using about 3-3.5 gigs of RAM.

I think this is the reason that my fps is only 40 fps sometimes and that the map doesn't load fast enough. I have an i5-7500 and a GTX 1060 6 GB so it should easily run GTA on high settings 60+ fps, and it has been like that before this issue.I also checked the RAM usage with Resource Monitor, shows the same thing, and RAMMap. It is not beacuse of cached memory, the game doesn't use more even if there is about 8 gbs of free RAM. Also tried with Rainbow6, it does not use more than 3 either, but it runs fine.

Does anyone know this issue? Thanks for your help

 

[ARICH5]

what OS are you using? 32bit OS does not use more than 3.8G of ram

 

[hotaru.hino]

GTAV and I'm guessing what they mean by "Rainbow6" is Rainbow Six Siege, require a 64-bit OS to run. However, if the OS requirement was a soft check and the applications are 32-bit (not getting a clear answer and can't check GTAV at the moment), they have a memory usage limitation of 4GB anyway. Or 2GB if the developer forgot the large address aware flag at compile time.

Would be curious to see what Task Manager -> Performance tab -> Memory page shows when running these games for a while.

 

[kacsa071]

what OS are you using? 32bit OS does not use more than 3.8G of ram

Hi, sorry for the late answer.

I am using a 64 bit OS (Win10) , my system as a whole does use more than 4gb so that's not the problem. The games are not using more.

 

[kacsa071]

GTAV and I'm guessing what they mean by "Rainbow6" is Rainbow Six Siege, require a 64-bit OS to run. However, if the OS requirement was a soft check and the applications are 32-bit (not getting a clear answer and can't check GTAV at the moment), they have a memory usage limitation of 4GB anyway. Or 2GB if the developer forgot the large address aware flag at compile time.

Would be curious to see what Task Manager -> Performance tab -> Memory page shows when running these games for a while.

Do you know how to check if the applications are 32-bit? If I run the games for a while it shows that it uses between 3-4gbs and other things use up like 8 more(might be cached memory), but I can do a test later and screenshot it if you want.

UPDATE: According to task manager details tab, GTA 5 is 64 bit.

 

[gamerk316]

Win32 applications remain bound by the 4GB Address Space limit, even on a 64-bit OS.

GTAV is certainly 64-bit. Pretty sure the game isn't that RAM intensive though. The issue could be a slow HDD, or the graphics settings being too high for the GPU (possibly using too much VRAM, which would tank performance).

 

[kacsa071]

Win32 applications remain bound by the 4GB Address Space limit, even on a 64-bit OS.

GTAV is certainly 64-bit. Pretty sure the game isn't that RAM intensive though. The issue could be a slow HDD, or the graphics settings being too high for the GPU (possibly using too much VRAM, which would tank performance).

Thanks, actually the game runs fine nowadays but rarely the performance drops(it was worse a couple of weeks ago for some reason, maybe driver updates).

The reason I think it might be in connection with the ram usage, is because I looked up benchmarks with the same system that I use and with the same settings their PCs use 6-8gbs of RAM not 3-4. VRAM usage is way under 6gb (what my GPU has) according to the in-game settings.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Thanks, actually the game runs fine nowadays but rarely the performance drops(it was worse a couple of weeks ago for some reason, maybe driver updates).

The reason I think it might be in connection with the ram usage, is because I looked up benchmarks with the same system that I use and with the same settings their PCs use 6-8gbs of RAM not 3-4. VRAM usage is way under 6gb (what my GPU has) according to the in-game settings.

I have this suspicion that if you increase the amount of physical memory, memory usage increases somehow. A lot of this though stems from the page table increasing in size if you have more RAM (because it has to account for the larger space), and every process supposedly has its own page table. But I can't see how say having 32GB of RAM would double the RAM usage outright compared to what you're seeing.

Although I did find this tool: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/vmmap . Now I want to use it for random things just to see what's going on.

EDIT: My only guess for GTA V if this is a guaranteed thing is maybe GTA V maps more game data into RAM for faster access to resources if more RAM is available. Though this would only be higher-resolution assets since most open world games made in the past 10 years or so operate on the idea of "load the bare minimum, then load better quality stuff later" to cut down on issues with storage stuttering.

 

[gamerk316]

Well, if you have more RAM, the obvious thing that would happen is less paging. But that wouldn't apply here unless something else was hogging a good deal of RAM.