Memory Leaks Still Not Fixed

[Shrimp Fried Rice]

I don't know if anyone at EA/Respawn will see this, but it's worth a shot.

Those Affected

Players in a variety of discussions (on Steam and EA forum) are still unable to play the game due to video memory leaks, including myself. This affects a wide variety of cards including NVIDIA 10 series cards, AMD 6/7000 series, RTX 3090, 40 series, and probably more (although these are the ones I have seen reported by several users). In other words, it is a lot of people, even after the various patches.

The Issue

Upon loading into the game with medium graphics settings, about 4.5 GB of video memory is in use. As the game is played, video memory usage climbs steadily without ever being reduced until eventually the limit is reached (this takes about 15 minutes). If you turn the settings (texture quality in particular) up or down, that time decreases or increases respectively, which is likely a result of lower quality textures requiring less space, thus allocating smaller increments of memory at a time and delaying the inevitable system crash.

All performance stats are within reasonable limits except for this. The May 18th patch heavily increased RAM usage, but it still isn't unmanageable.

Yes, this is a memory leak. No, it is not a user-end misconfiguration, driver issue, insufficient hardware, or any other similar problem. I am running a 1080ti which has 11 GB of video memory, plenty beyond the minimum needed (and also much more than the game uses when you begin playing). RTX 4090 users are working with a whopping 24 GB and many have the exact same issue, although it takes longer for the leak to crash their system as you can imagine.

Solutions?

Some people have been skeptical in response to others having this issue, so perhaps I can address some dissenting comments I have seen surrounding this.

User Error?
Graphics drivers are up to date. I also tried rolling back one version, but it didn't make a difference.
Windows is up to date, and since DX12 is distributed via Windows Updates, I shouldn't be missing anything there either.
DxDiag reports no issues in any categories.
I tried deleting the AppData/Local DX cache to force a regeneration, but this didn't seem to make a difference.

This issue has never occurred in any other game I have ever played, including other DX12-exclusive games which sometimes get a bad rap. In Elden Ring, for example, video memory never goes above 5 GB on maximum settings at 2k resolution. It does not climb over the course of a session, other than temporary increases which always fall back to equilibrium later (as you would expect from proper memory management).

Fallen Order on the exact same PC runs impeccably. Performance metrics on Survivor are nearly identical to Fallen Order besides bloated RAM usage post-patch and this video memory leak.

Increasing Page File Size
This fixes certain issues, but not a leak. For example, an insufficient page file size causes the game to crash while "optimizing game files" on startup. This is baffling, as there is plenty of RAM available during that time and yet paging is used heavily anyway, but whatever.

However, the time it takes for the PC to crash can be significantly prolonged by pumping up the page file to an obscene size, because virtual memory is used as a failover for video memory akin to its traditional use as a RAM extension. It doesn't fix the leak, but it can make the leak take so long to crash the system that you could do this to at least play for a good bit of time before needing to restart. If you are using a HDD, this is probably not a viable option, as the disk will not be fast enough to preserve game performance. If you have an SSD and are willing to let the game run poorly, though, you could use this as a workaround. Or if you don't have 50 GB free to allocate to a page file to allow the game to run for an hour, that would also make this not an option for you. If you can do this, don't forget to turn down texture quality so memory is allocated more slowly.

For a certain subset of players, this could allow memory-leakers to play through the game with some sacrifice. That is not a solution.

To Reproduce

- Set the page file to a static amount that is way higher than should ever be used (6-8 GB?)

- Watch performance monitor + task manager GPU panel and see memory usage and page file size creep up until everything crashes

- Set page file to be automatically handled by Windows and restart PC

- Play the game and watch performance monitor + task manager again; you will see video memory / page file usage creep up but when the limit is nearly reached, more page file space will be allocated. Eventually it could reach a gargantuan size. Notice that performance monitor usage appears steady because it is using the same percentage of available memory, but the total memory is increasing due to paging, thus the total used memory is also increasing.

Please do something about this so PC players can actually enjoy the game they paid 70 dollars for.

[HartFalleon]

Ah so that's what's maybe causing the "access violation errors," and the game just crashes randomly and afterwards I'll look at the amount of paged or cached RAM and it will be at around 28GBs and even though I have 64GBs total and a 24GB of VRAM on my video card it's like the game ran out of resources and then just crashes and somehow other people on lower specs like with less RAM and VRAM aren't having this issue?

[HartFalleon]

But it's really the game just not keeping it's usage within limits and using more and more as I play longer until it just crashes.

[HartFalleon]

Or sometimes it pops up as a "low level fatal error' but anyway it's not due to drivers being out of date or other not helpful placebo pieces of advice that get tossed around.

[Shrimp Fried Rice]

Originally posted by Cyphersilium:

Or sometimes it pops up as a "low level fatal error' but anyway it's not due to drivers being out of date or other not helpful placebo pieces of advice that get tossed around.

I haven't had that "low level fatal error" message as you mention, but this is definitely an issue that transcends any particular piece of hardware. You're exactly right though, the longer the game runs the more memory must be paged to compensate for the leak, and that's something that doesn't change from one PC to the next. In fact, I'll bet many people don't even realize this is an issue because by default Windows automatically manages the page file. So long as there is sufficient disk space and the disk itself can keep up, nobody would notice if they didn't intentionally check.

[HartFalleon]

Yeah other games some on UE4 have had this memory leak issue too and again I'm just baffled how some configurations are impacted less by it.

[DecoySS3]

Yup. Effecting my RX 7900 XTX at 2560x1440. With RT on after about 3 hours the memory leak hits 23GB my Frametimes get worse causing stutter to increase and eventually if I keep playing for another 30-40 minutes it crashes. With RT off it takes a lot longer as you’d imagine but there is most definitely a memory leak. Noticed it on day one and it’s still there.

[You]

same thing is happening with me , well explained brother

[All Day I Dream About🪓]

That’s an interesting idea, will have to check memory usage too. Specifically on Jedha with RT enabled it crashes every five minutes on 4090 for me. Other than that haven’t had any crashes except from couple random and pretty rare ones from day 1. I think OS has something do it with it too. Seen a lot more reports on win 10 from RTX 4xxx users then from win 11.

[Casus]

Yeah, there's definitely a leak - and I have to return to main menu and load back every few hours.

Steamdb depot for Jedi Survivor hasn't received an update for 4 days - meaning they've either abandoned the game - or they're doing a bunch of stuff internally without testing anything on a shared build.

Sadly, I have a notion of what's most likely.

[The Father]

Yep, the game climbs up to 20GB+ vram usage.

Also strange thing happened yesterday after quitting, the window closed but the process was still there at 4GB RAM usage, then it started to climb up 2GB each few seconds!!! So i had to kill the process after it reached 16GB as it was going up non-stop.

[AmaiAmai]

Originally posted by Casus:

Yeah, there's definitely a leak - and I have to return to main menu and load back every few hours.

Steamdb depot for Jedi Survivor hasn't received an update for 4 days - meaning they've either abandoned the game - or they're doing a bunch of stuff internally without testing anything on a shared build.

Sadly, I have a notion of what's most likely.

It's quite possible someone doing work got sick or something, that is always a possiblity.

At any rate, I don't have such a leak...but I also did patch RT not too long ago myself.

[CptJmac]

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.mediafire.com/file/dzrzpw74urdr9mb/ReduceMemory.zip/file

[Neiral]

Exactly as described by you guys.
I have 32gigs of ddr5 ram and a 6800xt with 16 gigs of vram, when I launch the game and start playing it goes from 7 vram to 15,5 vram in a matter of 30 min. (My ram usage stays at around 24 gigs the entire time)
However I managed to come up with a "solution"
For anyone interested in this "solution" before they patch this problem (I don't think they will):

- Save the game
- Go to the main menu
- VRAM usage drops.
- Play for another x min.
- Repeat the process

I recommend to track the values with something like Afterburner.

Hope this works for you.
Until they release a fix, may the force (luck) be with you.

[ReklomVera]

what's really starting to annoy me is that I want to keep my copy and play the dang game, but because of these issues I can't enjoy it or even manageably play it.

At this point, I wish I could just refund it because hoping for these issues to be fixed seems to be taking too long but Steam won't give me the refund

(I don't have the 2 hours of gameplay but I have owned it for more than 2 weeks but only because I was hoping the patches would come sooner down the line.. They didn't)

[End_Wokeness]

This is still a serious problem, on Koboh my VRAM quickly (as within an hour) gets up to the limit of my 4090, 21-22GB indicated in MSI Afterburner, and the game chugs heavily, with severe hitching, even though the FPS is at 75-80 (7680x2160, DLSS FG enabled, DLSS: Quality), disabling RT improves the FPS by about 10 and maybe cuts the hitching in half but doesn't eliminate it. What an absolutely gorgeous game, it's such a shame that it has this problem, I don't have another game in my entire library of over 100 games across multiple launchers that does this. That there is no continued communication from the devs is extremely concerning, are they working on this? $70 for this title, this is completely unacceptable. I purchased the game at a great discount on EA otherwise I would be extremely angry to have sunk over 2 hours into this only to find that it's borderline unplayable once you make it to Koboh outside of the refund window on top tier hardware.