Something wrong with memory usage.

sramelyk

Honorable
Aug 24, 2012
7
0
10,510
I recently built a new PC.. Here are the specs..

AMD Phenom II X4 945
8 GB RAM
MSI RADEON R4350 Graphics card
64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate

I normally don't game much on my PC and didn't build it to run best performance with the newest games.. But, out of curiosity I thought I'd try a few newer games to see how they ran.. Thats when I discovered a problem.

I installed Witcher 2, at the end of the installation or the start of the game it analysed my configuration and reported that I had 4 gigs of RAM.. Obviously thats not right so I was second guessing everything and reconfirming.. I know your limited to 4gb of ram with a 32-bit OS so I double checked and am indeed running Windows 64-bit OS. The system properties also show the 8gb of RAM. So, I figured it was probably an error on the games part. So, I started the game, which was horribly choppy, and then opened task manager to see what my performance looked like.. Thats were I got concerned.


This is what it showed -

Total : 8137
Cached : 4000
Available : 3958
Free : 21

I don't understand this.. Also, My memory graph is pegged at 4GB... It just seems like something is wrong. Like its only utilizing 4gb of RAM. Is there something in the BIOS I missed.. Hell, IT SHOWS 8GB of RAM! What gives.. Am I losing it?

 

sramelyk

Honorable
Aug 24, 2012
7
0
10,510
Yeah, the more I'm looking in to it I'm not sure I do.. However, no matter what I do I can't get it above 4gb usage.. I'm curious about it saying 4gb CACHED.. Does that mean its allocated 4GB as a disk cache or something? Rendering it unavailable as conventional memory usage?

I was thinking The Witcher is probably a 32-bit program. So, out of curiosity if a program is 32 bits does that mean its only able to use a maximum of 4gb of RAM? Sorry for the rhetorical questions. Catching up to the modern computing world. Had a single core with 4gb of ram for the last 7 years and because of that sorta didn't pay attention to progress.. Now I am trying to reinform myself.