Windows 8.1 Using all my RAM.

B Klipp

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Aug 11, 2014
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I have a Lenovo y510p laptop running WIndows 8.1. I have 8GB of RAM, an i7 processor and a GT750M graphics card.

Whenever I play a game, my game typically uses 2GB of RAM, according to task manager. However, task manager says I am using all of my RAM, even though the only other programs running are the necessary background programs, which run 80MB or RAM or less.

Whatever is causing my RAM to behave this way is making gaming virtually impossible due to a frame rate much a slideshow (which is listed as GPU bound, by the way).

Does anyone have any idea what may be going wrong with my computer?

Thank you for any and all help with this.
 
Solution


as i said. download msi afterburner, run it in the background when you play these games and check out if your gpu/cpu usage is spiking to 100% when you're lagging in the game. if that's not happening then yes... it's a ram issue... if it is, then it's a cpu/gpu issue (depending on what's hitting 100% utilization)


It's possible that windows hasn't recovered ram that's no longer being used or there's a memory leak.
 
I usually play Planetside 2, but I have this problem with most games. With no games running just now and only Chrome and Steam open, I am somehow using 3.3GB of RAM.
 
well windows 8 has been known to eat up as much as 3gb of ram... so i'm not that concerned, especially since some games can eat up 3-5gb of ram... but i am interested to know if he has disk caching on or not... if he doesn't then everything is being stored in the ram... and that can hurt as well.

EDIT: just saw your comment- yeah... 3gb chewed up with not much open is pretty common in windows 8...
 
Well, regardless of whether the RAM usage is normal or not, it seems that my RAM usage is preventing me from playing any games, which is the main reason I opted for this laptop in the first place. What can I do to fix my RAM issue to make these games playable? Thanks for the input thus far.
 


There are some RAM recovery programs you can find out there that will try to recover ram that you should have but didn't get back when you closed a program. I've used them before and worked fine but they were on laptops that had 4 Gigs of ram but they were freeware programs so no hurt at all and it worked.
 
1) make sure paging file is turned on and on AUTOMATIC for all hard drives.

Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Advanced Tab -> Settings... (under the "Performance" section) -> Advanced Tab -> under "Virtual Memory" click Change... -> Make sure "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" ( i don't have windows 8 installed currently, it might be found somewhere else)

2) windows 8 is designed to take up ALL the ram availible if possible. it's not suposed to harm performance but i know people who have had 16gb of system ram eaten up by windows 8... it's part of the windows 8 "cheat" that makes it seem faster then windows7, supposedly it will cache that extra bloat onto your hard drive in the pagefile if something else calls for that ram. So in theory if your windows is hitting full 8gb of usage, it's working as intended and your problem might not be the ram usage.

-planetside 2 for example is a single threaded title that loved fast cpus... you have a mobile cpu clocked at 2.4ghz... that can cause some issues with world battles with lots of people on. to insure we know WHAT is bottlenecking, download MSI Afterburner, run it in the background when you're playing planetside2, after some serious bottlenecking exit out of the program and see if your gpus or a cpu core or two are getting spiked to 100% utilization. if that's happening then it's not a ram issue, it's a cpu/gpu issue.
 
Currently, none of my games are playable enough to determine where the game would be bottlenecking. I tried updating my drivers and it stated that they were all up to date.

Do you have any leads on how to check if this is not a RAM issue? I'm not completely familiar how things work under the hood. Thanks for taking the time to help me.
 


as i said. download msi afterburner, run it in the background when you play these games and check out if your gpu/cpu usage is spiking to 100% when you're lagging in the game. if that's not happening then yes... it's a ram issue... if it is, then it's a cpu/gpu issue (depending on what's hitting 100% utilization)
 
Solution
Thanks for the help, ingtar. MSI is showing that my GPU is pretty much maxed out the entire time while playing a game, though my occasionally maxes as well, and I am still getting warnings that a lot of RAM is being used.