Stop claiming the game suffers from a memory leak!

[Dexter Morgan]

A memory leak is only when your GPU's memory gets maxed out, so the game starts hogging up on system memory, and then it eventually goes into your page file. The game just simply uses a lot of memory because it was made in the first ever version of Unreal Engine 5, which has a lot of CPU optimization bugs that are not present in UE5.5. In order to stop all stuttering and fps drops into the single digits, you have to be utilizing under 80% of your GPU's memory. For example, the safe zone for 8GB cards is 6400MB. If it goes past that in utilization in any game, the textures will die or performance will drop. Also, Steam uses around 700MB of GPU memory when you have it opened. Therefore, to fix this issue, you must minimize Steam launcher to tray after launching the game. I hope I have been of great help to you guys. Enjoy a smooth and buttery game!

To help people out with 8GBs of GPU memory, you need to be running a mix of high and medium settings in order for fps to not immediately die when saving inside settlements. All you can do is 1080p native high preset with: textures on medium, environmental shadows on medium, object shadow quality on medium, object quality on medium, clouds quality on medium, sky rendering on medium, and global illumination on medium.

[lockwoodx]

I turned off steam overlay for the heck of it and the game feels a smidge snappier.

edit: also there's def NOT a memory leak. Everyone knows I'm running this on one of the oldest rigs and had a comfortable 4hr session this afternoon crash-free, issue-free.

[Alias]

Originally posted by c0Zm1c:

Originally posted by Alias:

Ok. Let us stay on topic. Op is in my opion wrong on the finer detail of his discussion. That can be pointed out. On a broader scale, the game has been tested, there are issues but in all the testing I have personally seen, there are no mem leaks.

Whilst it may be true for a select few, if the game had a ''True memory leak'' irrespective of the fact we haven't even determined the type of memory they are referring too, it would be widespread.

What I posted is on topic. :\

You not experiencing it (it's a massive game so experiences from person to person will differ) and splitting hairs with "true" memory leak and whether or not its VRAM or main memory (a memory leak is a memory leak, does it matter?) just seems like dodging the obvious here.

It is not a case of ''It's not happening to me so it doesn't exist''. This is just a case of hyperbole about memory leaks caused by a vocal minority. Lets agree to disagree and move on.

[Antmax]

It might be from using FSR Frame Gen on Nvidia cards while using DLLS. I was still getting crashes after the two updates. Disabled FSR Framegen on my 3060 and the weird random mem leak type behaviour seems to have gone away.

I had problems with Grey Zone Warfare in UE 5.1 that game was using too. I guess the moral of the story is to not use AMD tech on Nvidia hardware lol.

[zpc]

Originally posted by Belmont:

OP doesn't know what a memory leak actually is.

It's incorrect management of available memory. It doesn't release the memory after its not needed anymore. Therefore the longer you play, the less available memory there is because it's not being released.

A memory leak has nothing to do what so ever with having Steam up after you launch.

Indeed. The game had and has memory leaks. Even with the current patch (1.0.2. at time of writing) I can at least indentify 3 situations when VRAM and / or RAM is filled to a point where constant swapping let's suffer the fps:

• Extensive use of trading / stash box usage. Doing repairs / sells in rapid succession of several (100+) items will fill up VRAM very quickly (I suspect a UI related memleak here)
  
• Loading a game but not "pressing any key" (=let the loading screen stay) for a while while being alt-tabbed out of the game will fill up VRAM
  
• Occasionally longer playsessions (3-4 hours) will fill up VRAM

What most people doesn't seem to understand is that mem leaks are a pest - they are very hard to reproduce and it can be tiny details which make them show up or not. (hardware, specific user action, specific user action frequency ...). They are kind of an esoteric problem but at the end can be logically explained [by a tech - if the real cause is finally found].

Disclaimer: my PoV is that of a software developer and I'm monitoring this behaviour since release on my i7 9700k | 32 GB RAM | 4070ti super 16 GB VRAM. The latest patch (1.0.2.) did stabilize the system a bit, but GSC still has to do some work here.

[Duspende]

Memory leak isn't what OP is describing. OP is simply describing an "Out-of-memory" fatal error.

If I have a phone book that can hold 10 phone numbers you might need, and I write down those 10 phone numbers, but you need 11 phone numbers, that's an "out-of-memory" error and what OP is describing.

A memory leak would be you needing 10 phone numbers, but there is no space in the phone book because I didn't erase the previous 10 numbers, or I wrote the same number several times. Technically, you are still out-of-memory, but it's the fault of the application (in this case me). So the games fault for not recognizing when a phone number (texture/material/in-game asset) is no longer required to be available to fetch quickly (think something like still rendering anomalies that are too far away for you to even see or interact with, or what the walls inside Slag Heap are supposed to look like even though you're in the Lesser Zone and have been for 45 minutes).

This means there is no available space to load things that you are actually close to into the fast-fetch memory (VRAM).

In OP's example, it's your own fault because you didn't buy me a phone book with enough space to fit all the numbers (I.e your fault for not having enough memory to run the game).

[Duspende]

Originally posted by zpc:

Originally posted by Belmont:

OP doesn't know what a memory leak actually is.

It's incorrect management of available memory. It doesn't release the memory after its not needed anymore. Therefore the longer you play, the less available memory there is because it's not being released.

A memory leak has nothing to do what so ever with having Steam up after you launch.

Indeed. The game had and has memory leaks. Even with the current patch (1.0.2. at time of writing) I can at least indentify 3 situations when VRAM and / or RAM is filled to a point where constant swapping let's suffer the fps:

• Extensive use of trading / stash box usage. Doing repairs / sells in rapid succession of several (100+) items will fill up VRAM very quickly (I suspect a UI related memleak here)
  
• Loading a game but not "pressing any key" (=let the loading screen stay) for a while while being alt-tabbed out of the game will fill up VRAM
  
• Occasionally longer playsessions (3-4 hours) will fill up VRAM

What most people doesn't seem to understand is that mem leaks are a pest - they are very hard to reproduce and it can be tiny details which make them show up or not. (hardware, specific user action, specific user action frequency ...). They are kind of an esoteric problem but at the end can be logically explained [by a tech - if the real cause is finally found].

Disclaimer: my PoV is that of a software developer and I'm monitoring this behaviour since release on my i7 9700k | 32 GB RAM | 4070ti super 16 GB VRAM. The latest patch (1.0.2.) did stabilize the system a bit, but GSC still has to do some work here.

A solid way I've found to reproduce a persistent memory leak error is to keep loading a save. I've noticed that I can play for a sufficiently long time, sometimes hours with no noticeable drop in performance until I die and have to reload a save.

What usually happens is I'll save before engaging enemies, get killed, reload the save, engage the enemies again and this time my FPS has dropped by 10-20. I then die again due to the lag, reload the same save, and my FPS will now drop seemingly exponentially with every subsequent reload.

My guess is that it re-caches almost EVERYTHING into memory every time you reload a save, and there might even be a compounding error for subsequent reloads without restarting the game.

A remedy is often to look at the ground/your feet for a few minutes and the game will seemingly eventually refresh it all on its own (Although this only seems to buy you a few minutes of optimal performance at a time). Pressing Escape and waiting also seems to work, but standing still and staring while lagging doesn't seem to work. You gotta obscure much of the rendered game world by looking at the ground or pausing the game.

[la creatura]

There is a bugged area in hubs where you can specifically look at and get fps drops, in my case, i found at what settings with the engine. ini config I don't have them. and 2 of my friends, both with 4080s, have the same issues, and my config helped them too. There is some problem with the Nanite draw distance and lumen quality. basically, it's a combo of material quality, hair quality and draw distance, and tree quality. everything medium and hair on low helps. my engine:

[SystemSettings]
;no shader cache at startup
r.PSOWarmup.WarmupMaterials=0
;Disables Eye Adaptation
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=1
r.EyeAdaptation.LensAttenuation=2
r.EyeAdaptation.ExponentialTransitionDistance=3 

;main part
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.DownsampleFactor=16 ;more number more fps, but bigger then 16 is a mess
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO=0 
r.Lumen.GlobalIllumination.ScreenTraces.MaxIterations=1 
r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenTraces.MaxIterations=1 
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ScreenTraces=1 
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Settings.Quality=1 
r.Lumen.Reflections.Quality=1 
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.HemisphereResolution=1
r.Lumen.TraceMeshSDFs=0


;u can try without part below, it enable more shadows
r.Lumen.TranslucencyReflections.FrontLayer.Allow=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.DownsampleFactor=0
r.Lumen.Reflections.MaxRoughnessToTrace=0.27
r.Lumen.Reflections.Temporal=0
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=2048
r.Shadow.FilterMethod=1
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=5
r.Shadow.Virtual.smrt.samplesperraydirectional=2
r.Shadow.Virtual.smrt.texelditherscalelocal=24
r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.SmoothBias=1
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ScreenTraces.HZBTraversal=0
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.SpatialFilterNumPasses=1  

[PocketYoda]

Originally posted by 76561199069329982:

A memory leak is only when your GPU's memory gets maxed out, so the game starts hogging up on system memory, and then it eventually goes into your page file. The game just simply uses a lot of memory because it was made in the first ever version of Unreal Engine 5, which has a lot of CPU optimization bugs that are not present in UE5.5. In order to stop all stuttering and fps drops into the single digits, you have to be utilizing under 80% of your GPU's memory. For example, the safe zone for 8GB cards is 6400MB. If it goes past that in utilization in any game, the textures will die or performance will drop. Also, Steam uses around 700MB of GPU memory when you have it opened. Therefore, to fix this issue, you must minimize Steam launcher to tray after launching the game. I hope I have been of great help to you guys. Enjoy a smooth and buttery game!

To help people out with 8GBs of GPU memory, you need to be running a mix of high and medium settings in order for fps to not immediately die when saving inside settlements. All you can do is 1080p native high preset with: textures on medium, environmental shadows on medium, object shadow quality on medium, object quality on medium, clouds quality on medium, sky rendering on medium, and global illumination on medium.

That is literally a memory leak lol

[UnKn0wN]

Originally posted by Alias:

Originally posted by c0Zm1c:

As I said:


With such an extensive list of fixes, which in itself suggests there's a lot of things wrong with the game, the idea that they caught everything in the first patch isn't exactly realistic.

Ok. Let us stay on topic. Op is in my opion wrong on the finer detail of his discussion. That can be pointed out. On a broader scale, the game has been tested, there are issues but in all the testing I have personally seen, there are no mem leaks.

Whilst it may be true for a select few, if the game had a ''True memory leak'' irrespective of the fact we haven't even determined the type of memory they are referring too, it would be widespread.

call it memory leak or not, there is this issue of game suddenly and randomly stopping performing normally and going into slideshow out of nowhere.

it is widespread, tons of threads about it here and everywhere people discuss this game with all sort of different setups, even youtubers experiencing it live or people that do benchmarks with all sort of hardware will confirm this is an issue within the game.

CSG tried to fix it in the first patches, it´s better than before but it´s still there.
it´s in the patch notes, they say fixed various potential memory leaks and crashes !


let´s not pretend this shipped in a good shape. lol
it´s not done with the first few patches, it will take tons of patches just like with Cyberpunk.

[la creatura]

Originally posted by UnKn0wN:

Originally posted by Alias:

Ok. Let us stay on topic. Op is in my opion wrong on the finer detail of his discussion. That can be pointed out. On a broader scale, the game has been tested, there are issues but in all the testing I have personally seen, there are no mem leaks.

Whilst it may be true for a select few, if the game had a ''True memory leak'' irrespective of the fact we haven't even determined the type of memory they are referring too, it would be widespread.

call it memory leak or not, there is this issue of game suddenly and randomly stopping performing normally and going into slideshow out of nowhere.

it is widespread, tons of threads about it here and everywhere people discuss this game with all sort of different setups, even youtubers experiencing it live or people that do benchmarks with all sort of hardware will confirm this is an issue within the game.

CSG tried to fix it in the first patches, it´s better than before but it´s still there.
it´s in the patch notes, they say fixed various potential memory leaks and crashes !


let´s not pretend this shipped in a good shape. lol
it´s not done with the first few patches, it will take tons of patches just like with Cyberpunk.

and i dont believe they doesnt know that problem exist at launch, and so there would be a fast fix if they let it ship with those problems.

[Alias]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥ Spacien:

Originally posted by UnKn0wN:

call it memory leak or not, there is this issue of game suddenly and randomly stopping performing normally and going into slideshow out of nowhere.

it is widespread, tons of threads about it here and everywhere people discuss this game with all sort of different setups, even youtubers experiencing it live or people that do benchmarks with all sort of hardware will confirm this is an issue within the game.

CSG tried to fix it in the first patches, it´s better than before but it´s still there.
it´s in the patch notes, they say fixed various potential memory leaks and crashes !


let´s not pretend this shipped in a good shape. lol
it´s not done with the first few patches, it will take tons of patches just like with Cyberpunk.

and i dont believe they doesnt know that problem exist at launch, and so there would be a fast fix if they let it ship with those problems.

Well this is a topic about mem leaks specifically so looks like you are in the wrong place. Maybe you can find the general performance thread somewhere. Cya. *Alias turns his back to unknown and starts whistling the Ukrainian nation anthem as the poor, misinformed troglodyte slowly fades into non-existence.

[Sloop]

The actual developers of the game: "there is a memory leak, we're looking into making a fix"

Random user on steam forums "ThErEs No MeMoRy LeAk"

Holy coolaid

[la creatura]

Originally posted by Alias:

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥ Spacien:

and i dont believe they doesnt know that problem exist at launch, and so there would be a fast fix if they let it ship with those problems.

Well this is a topic about mem leaks specifically so looks like you are in the wrong place. Maybe you can find the general performance thread somewhere. Cya. *Alias turns his back to unknown and starts whistling the Ukrainian nation anthem as the poor, misinformed troglodyte slowly fades into non-existence.

no clowns for u, fade in non-existence lmao

[Alias]

Originally posted by Pliauskis:

The actual developers of the game: "there is a memory leak, we're looking into making a fix"

Random user on steam forums "ThErEs No MeMoRy LeAk"

Holy coolaid

They said they fixed potential mem leaks. Stop trying to flame. All performance tests in this game that I have seen have not had a mem leak (I watched maybe 2 dozen) before I bought the game.. Sounds like potato problems. Should have upgraded. ''I bOuGht My PC 6 yEaRs aGo.......ShOuLd PlAy GaYmE!!!!!!!''

[zpc]

Originally posted by Alias:

Originally posted by Pliauskis:

The actual developers of the game: "there is a memory leak, we're looking into making a fix"

Random user on steam forums "ThErEs No MeMoRy LeAk"

Holy coolaid

They said they fixed potential mem leaks. Stop trying to flame. All performance tests in this game that I have seen have not had a mem leak (I watched maybe 2 dozen) before I bought the game.. Sounds like potato problems. Should have upgraded. ''I bOuGht My PC 6 yEaRs aGo.......ShOuLd PlAy GaYmE!!!!!!!''

Just for the sake of reflection: who is flaming now?