Can someone explain the difference between memory usage of taskmanager process list?

[Magistar]

Hi there... Is there someone with an explanation of the following discrepancy.

Why does starting a PA game mean I am using 95% memory of mu 8 GB ram (7,56 GB) whereas PA take about 3000 MB in the windows task manager process list creating that has aa total of +- 4000 MB including PA.

Does my videocard memory get added or something?

ps
I started PA on my other system on the same resolution and detail settings by with a 1024MB videocard and there the system used about 7,08 GB ram after starting a PA game (compared to +- 2 GB before launching).

[SXX]

There also CoherentUI_Host.txt processes. 32 of them in total that use 1.6GB on Windows.
More info why is that work this way can be found in this topic:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/0/616187204020604040/

Exchequer님이 먼저 게시:

I started PA on my other system on the same resolution and detail settings by with a 1024MB videocard and there the system used about 7,08 GB ram after starting a PA game (compared to +- 2 GB before launching).

Keep in mind that 1GB of video memory only enough for "low" setting for "virtual texture" on most of systems and if you going to use higher setting then game going to unload a lof of things in RAM and also you'll get significant performance drop.

[Magistar]

When I add up ALL running processes I am no where near 95% of 8 GB. Check:
http://i.minus.com/iblmWr7yO8Zfa9.png
It adds to about 4000MB including the CoherentUI (300mb).

Compare with total ram usage:
http://minus.com/i/Wrbbqn8DlnWJ

My regular machine is a 2500K 8GB GTX 660 Ti PE (2048MB), my backup machine is a 4670K 8 GB GTX 460 (1024MB). Both show this descrepancy in ram usage. Now I am not blaming PA persé, I have seen this on some other games. I just dont understand it...

Currently it is annoying me because I am getting out of memory warnings on a system with 8 GB ram. That is a first since 15+ years...

[zgrssd]

It is common for laptop GPU's to jsut take a chunk of the RAM as video ram. But usually that is detracted from total ram before windows starts (i.e. deatl with on Bios/Efi level).

You should consider starting the resource manager. It can give you a more detailed overview about resoruce usage.

[SXX]

Exchequer님이 먼저 게시:

My regular machine is a 2500K 8GB GTX 660 Ti PE (2048MB), my backup machine is a 4670K 8 GB GTX 460 (1024MB). Both show this descrepancy in ram usage. Now I am not blaming PA persé, I have seen this on some other games. I just dont understand it...

Your operation system does have some memory usage like 300-500MB. Also you keep software running in background, especially Google Chrome (which is Coherent UI based on) which also usually create quite a lot of processes.

So in your case game memory usage was about 4.7GB (PA.exe is 3.1GB and CoherentUI_Host.exe it's 1.6GB), some used by your OS (let's say 300MB) and other software that remain running (2.3GB). Next if you see on your task manager screenshot you'll see there is 300MB marked as "cached" and this mean this part of RAM used by file system cache or any other cache and it's might become free on demand.

This picture is totally fine for any normal PC and as long as you have page file / virtual memory enabled and large enough (I recommend 12GB as minimum) there will be zero issues with OS or game stability.

Hopefully this helps you to understand how this works.

[Magistar]

WellI am happy you are making an effort in explaining this :).

I guess it makes more sense then I thought because starting the game I was at about 2,48 so if you add the 4,7 you mention you end up at 7,18. So that is already close to the value on my screenshot.

I must admit that I have modified the pagefile to range from 1600-8196MB since I switched to an SSD 2 years ago. I will try to increase it to the value suggested and see if I can start other software when without the "Out of memory" errors. I hope it works :).

[SXX]

If you have 2nd HDD then you can enable large page file there and disable it on SSD completely. :-)

[Magistar]

I opted to uninstall Battlefield 3 :D.

Hereby I can confirm that I no longer get out of memory when starting Geforce Experience during PA at 99% memory usage :). I changed memory to 2000-12333MB :).

(Now please ask this AI commander to stop launching nukes at me, I don't know how to kill them).

[zgrssd]

Exchequer님이 먼저 게시:

Hereby I can confirm that I no longer get out of memory when starting Geforce Experience during PA at 99% memory usage :). I changed memory to 2000-12333MB :).

(Now please ask this AI commander to stop launching nukes at me, I don't know how to kill them).

T2 engineers can build Anti Nuke launchers. The anti-launchers have to build the missiles themself (like the nucelar launchers), but the anti-missiles are way cheaper and the launcher can store up to 3 shoots. After placing one you should rush to actually finish one missile at least.

If you are in GW without T2:
Try other systems (single planet + planet & moon) till you find some advanced tech.
Especialyl true on hard and later.

SXX님이 먼저 게시:

If you have 2nd HDD then you can enable large page file there and disable it on SSD completely. :-)

This is adviseable.
For all thier advantages SSD have two disadvantages:
High Cost/Byte
Limited number of write operations (some advanced mapping tries to keep the disk in mostly even shape here).
(And it is rather hard to securly delete data, unless it provides a hardware feature for that)

Placing the pagefile (propably the most writing intensive file of Windows) there is fast.
But also going to ruin that disk lifetime almost as fast a repeated defragmentation.

[Magistar]

Yes I am playing in the Galactic War mode. I can beat the first commander that is located on my planet. But the other 2 planets are almost impossible to invade. They have about 40 orbital fighters. I managed to succesfully land and build a teleporter but the platform had no land connection to the AI base. After that I got pounded by Tier 2 bombers and I was left with +- 200 tanks that had no where to go. At the same time game speed slowed to 20% of regular speed so I just gave up.

So thanks for the tip I will try some other systems to find the nuke/anti-nuke tech first :).

Regarding the SSD writes. I actually opted for the Intel 520 that has 5000 writecycles instead of 3000 writecycles. For the first 2 years it has been doing about 9 GB/day avarage. Warrenty covers 25 GB/day for 5 years. At this rate it will be good for decades ^^. It has actually been demonstrated that you can safely write up to 600 TB+ with the SSD's so no need to worry about that anymore. In fact it shows that I did not really need the 5000 writecycle memory.

http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb

[SXX]

zgrssd님이 먼저 게시:

Placing the pagefile (propably the most writing intensive file of Windows) there is fast.
But also going to ruin that disk lifetime almost as fast a repeated defragmentation.

I'm didn't recommended placing page file on SSD for anyone, but let's say fair so far I seen zero situations when SSD dide to to overwrite limitations. 99% of problems I seen include my dead OCZ Vector it's controller hardware or firmware failures.