I have 16 GB of RAM, and while playing Horizon Forbidden West the game itself appears to use around 6 GB. However, the performance menu shows almost all of my memory being used—about 15.9 out of 16 GB. The listed applications don't add up to more than roughly 8 GB. I'm also noticing performance drops after playing for about 30 minutes. I have a dedicated graphics card, so I'm wondering what could be consuming the rest of the memory.
2 Answers
The memory total includes more than just the RAM assigned directly to the game. Windows also counts cached or standby memory, background processes, compressed memory, and memory reserved for system functions. Cached memory is normally released automatically when another program needs it, so a high percentage by itself isn’t necessarily a problem. Since you’re getting performance drops after around half an hour, check whether the committed memory, pagefile usage, or the game’s total memory use keeps increasing over time. That could indicate a memory leak or the system running out of available memory.
Some RAM can still be shared or reserved even when you have a dedicated GPU. Check the detailed memory view in Task Manager or Resource Monitor and look at In use, Available, Cached, Committed, and Hardware reserved rather than only the overall percentage. If available memory falls very low and Windows starts heavily using the pagefile, that can cause stuttering. A dedicated graphics card makes GPU-shared memory less likely to be the main cause, though.
I’m using a dedicated graphics card, so I’ll check the detailed memory categories and pagefile activity instead of relying on the headline percentage.
The performance does drop after about half an hour of gameplay, so I’m trying to figure out whether the memory reading is related.