My experience on Windows 7

[CoreHaven]

It's minimum requirement to have Windows 10. Don't ask I'll get around to it.
Anyways the game plays pretty darn good on Windows 7.
But about 30min to an hour in Windows runs out of memory and the game will crash.
Happens consistently.
I tried to run the game in Administrative Mode you know, just trying things.
That caused screen tearing to occur I believe, and not only in the game but across my PC even just watching video on Youtube.
Had to reinstall my drivers. Yuck.
That fixed it. That's my experience. For prosperity.
So if you have Windows 7 the game may launch and play and then suffer Windows memory problems and I really WOULD NOT recommend running it in Administrative Mode.
I need to get Windows 10 installed. Gah.....

[Arkzus]

I've been playing it on Win7 also, haven't had an issues other than eventually get a lot of lag after playing for quite some time in one session. A restart fixes it.

[Sylent Ghost]

I am atcually playing on a iMac duel booted into Windows 10 Home edt which is not ideal. I have played for 66 hours so far and cant tell you how many times I have restarted my compture beacuse it because of this issue! I didnt know it was a memory problem though. I only have a few bosses left to beat and the game has become one of my alltime favoruties. Reducing the graphics somtimes lets me play a bit longer before needing to restart my machine again.

[Sylent Ghost]

Found a fix to restarting. Run RazorCortex boosted and tick all the boxes so it shuts down everything nto being used, not a single crash after doing this

[JoeTheJeweler]

Works fine on windows 7 with no crashing (I played for over 2 hours the first time). Maybe that's because I have 64gb of ram, maybe it's something else. Just thought I'd weigh in, for _posterity_.

[Rathelm]

You do know they're on Windows 11 now right?

[David Puddy]

hahah, windows 7, geesh

[Mansen]

Originally posted by CoreHaven:

It's minimum requirement to have Windows 10.

No sensible developer is going to officially support an operating system that's been discontinued for years at this point - even if the game TECHNICALLY might run. It's just way too much support and programming work.

[TTV||Cdog_]

OP if the money of upgrading is stopping you there are a bunch of key websites you can buy a cheap license to upgrade to. if windows 11 isn't your jam atleast you can chill on windows 10 and play stuff. cheers.

[Tayo]

I also play on Windows 7 since it's the superior experience unlike most of the drones that regurgitate upgrading to 10 or even worse 11, without knowing anything of what goes on under the hood, and I also have this memory leak issue that OP has mentioned.

I'm sorry to say that all those steps you took to fix it and the time you wasted were for nothing.

In fact, everybody has this issue and it is not OS-caused. It has been mentioned numerous times that this is a Unity (the game's engine) issue that requires upstream updates from Unity themselves and many have pointed out fearfully that this fix might not ever come.

The only band-aid fix you can apply to make it less painful is to get more RAM. For instance I'm at 8 gigs and I definitely feel the leak after an hour but a friend of mine is at 16 and he almost never restarts, also probably helped by the fact that at most he played for 5-6 hours per session.

You can also free up existing RAM that's used for other processes but that will only minimally impact it. I suspect this is what caused you to believe you fixed it since there was more RAM to consume for the application after a fresh install.

Normally when data is no longer needed applications run multiple ways of clearing it from RAM so that space can be made for other data that needs loading. Memory leaks are caused by poor memory handling.

When a leak happens old data is left stored in RAM even though it is no longer needed by the app. That old data slowly starts clogging RAM, consuming more and more until it reaches the RAM capacity limit. That is why a restart fixes the problem since if the application consuming all that RAM stops executing, the RAM allocated to it is also freed of stored data.

This is just a basic explanation and I suspect Unity's memory leak actually does clean out old data but at a very poor/slow/inefficient rate, which is why we're not seeing a complete freeze of the game (and your system) eventually like with the more basic memory leaks.

[YankelMyWankel]

As an IT professional who sees everyday the various cyberthreats out there and vulnerabilities in even modern infrastructure, it is extremely cringey to see that anyone is still dumb enough to run Windows 7 especially when connected to the internet it is nothing but a vector for data theft. Seriously... Get the hell of Windows 7 if you have any value to your PII and data, it's bad enough that the majority of Windows 10 devices are going to be unable to upgrade to Windows 11 properly in October of 2025, so do yourself a favor and invest in a proper system now. There's nothing wrong with Windows 10 and even Windows 11 is great, I haven't had any problem with it and has plenty of reliability.

[Stucuk]

Originally posted by YankelMyWankel:

As an IT professional who sees everyday the various cyberthreats out there and vulnerabilities in even modern infrastructure, it is extremely cringey to see that anyone is still dumb enough to run Windows 7 especially when connected to the internet it is nothing but a vector for data theft.

X to Doubt. OS vulnerabilities are for elevating privileges and easier spread within a local network(Local because your router blocks incoming traffic by default). They are not the attack vectors. The attack vector is generally getting someone to download a malicious file, by that point its already on your system, doesn't matter what OS you have. You don't need admin rights to do damage or even connect to the internet to send any information you want back.

In a Business you can argue its a lot more valuable because you have hundreds of people who are not bright and will click on obvious fake e-mails and download and run the attachments, so your doing it for damage mitigation. But for a home PC which only you use its not an issue (Most people don't have multiple computers on their home network).

What you need to keep up to date is stuff like your Browser, applications which face the internet. Once its on your PC its already too late.

Originally posted by Taiyoumaru:

In fact, everybody has this issue and it is not OS-caused. It has been mentioned numerous times that this is a Unity (the game's engine) issue that requires upstream updates from Unity themselves and many have pointed out fearfully that this fix might not ever come.

Not all Unity games have this issue, so are we sure its actually one of Unity's systems which is leaking and not how the game is using them?

Originally posted by Mansen:

No sensible developer is going to officially support an operating system that's been discontinued for years at this point - even if the game TECHNICALLY might run. It's just way too much support and programming work.

Thats actually false. Its only an issue if the exe uses Windows API functions which are not in an older version of Windows(Which is highly unlikely). Even if they do its very easy to have fallback functions in place which do the same job but for older systems.

The only thing they really need to do is have 1 PC which has Windows 7/8 Installed and see if it runs.

Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 are all based on the same architecture. They are not re-inventing the wheel here, its just incremental differences.