Could my RAM be the cause of performance issues?

[Il nome della Rosa]

Hello everyone, while playing the game I noticed some major fps drops (from around 100 uncapped, to 40) in hogwarts and hogmeade and I noticed that while the drops were happening the disk usage increased, and this happens with any graphics quality setting (I tried them all), I don't think it's a GPU issue since I have a RTX 3070 or a CPU one (i7 11700K), but since I only have 16Gb of RAM I suppose it's not enough for the big areas of the game and Windows starts paging on my SSD (which is actually pretty slow to be an SSD).

So, does anybody know any potential fix (I already tried the engine.ini one) or should I just increase my RAM?

I bought the game knowing the recommended specs from the steam store page were 16gb and I have never had any issue of this kind with all the new games that recommended the same RAM size.

Thank you in advance.

[Nordars]

Just telling you, i had stuttering EVERYWHERE, and almost always.

I upgraded my ram from 2400mhz 16 gb to 3600mhz 32gb, and the stuttering went GONE, literally.

OFC i have fps drops on heavy areas (3060 ti) but its not the same as the stuttering that was making my game feel totaly unplayable.

[Nordars]

Also, forgot to say that my ram usage when i had 16gb was always at 90-95%, when i upgraded to 32gb i noticed that when i was playing the game the usage was ALWAYS higher than 17 GB, make your own conclussions x)

Btw my game is on my M.2 but i had it on a regular SSD.

[zargo_zore]

I feel like a lot of the performance complaints from this game are from the 16gig ram crowd. I use a minimal about of background programs and while running the game on 32gig high speed ram I'm hitting over 20gig ram useage so this game is def enjoying the ram.

[漂流者]

i got 16gb of ram, playing on ultra setting 1080p and since yesterdays update/patch my stutters are gone (i still get fps drops on rare RARE accasions like when opening the field book aka pause menu).

Also before the patch both me & my friend had stuttering & he has 32GB of ram, he actually had more stuttering and fps issues then i did (so just wanna point out it's not all in the ram, though if you play on higher resolution then 1080p then yes you 100% want to upgrade to 32gb if you can & also not saying that upgrading to 32gb from 16gb wouldn't help with performance, just giving you my experiencee with 16gb of ram)

p.s my specs are i7 9700k, 2070 Super, 16gb ram & yes game is installed on HDD not even on SSD cuz i don't have an SSD for gaming atm (only nvme which system is on & i don't like having games and other stuff on same drive as my system, so i have games on my HDD until i can buy an SSD big enough to make it worth buying for games, since we all know you install 2-3 games this days and 500GB gone...)

p.s2 almost forgot i do use DLSS though i have the upscaling sharpness or whatever is called right below DLSS to "off" idk if that actually disables the DLSS or just the upscaling since (DLSS is still selected in the above setting) & i updated my DLSS to 3.1.1 from a guide you can find here on steam's guide page (i had upscaling set to 0.15 for a while but got tired of having to constantly re-do it cuz for some reason when you restart the game it resets the upscaling to 0 so i just set it to OFF rofl & saw 0 performance change so idk if dlss is actually in work or off at this point and has any effect or not xD)

[Sir Noob Wulf]

Originally posted by zargo_zore:

I feel like a lot of the performance complaints from this game are from the 16gig ram crowd. I use a minimal about of background programs and while running the game on 32gig high speed ram I'm hitting over 20gig ram useage so this game is def enjoying the ram.

I have a counter argument to this, I have two machines, both with 16 gb DDR4 memory one at 3600 and the other at 3200, One is stuttering the other isn't as much.

I can't currently splash to get more ram tho :(

[Tritania]

I have 32GB of DDR4 3070Ti and i9-9900k - game still runs ass

[Starcake]

It could be, sure just yet one more anecdotal experience to the pile, but I had 16 Gigs of RAM @3600 CL16 XMP profile (from my mother board QVL as well), and then I bought a new twin kit, the very same pair I had, and populated the 2 empty slots and suddenly all stutters are gone. I even managed to bump from High preset to all Ultra (no RT of course). I have a 3070 and a Ryzen 5800X and now 32 Gigs of RAM @3600 CL16 from G.Skill.

Game runs really well now. I also noticed that on Rivatuner the memory usage is always like this 18-22 allocated and 12-16 being used depending on the area, so yeah, this game is very, VERY RAM hungry.

If this trend keeps up, soon 32 will be the new 16 for gaming. So you can take this with a grain of salt, because as I said, just my personal experience, but as somene pointed out, it does seem that most people complaining from performance (with a few exceptions) coime from people with 16 Gigs of RAM, although I've seen some folks with ultra high end system complaining as well.

EDIT: Just a brief edit. I forgot to mention that I play on 1440p. So I imagine that 16 is not enough for that resolution. Maybe for 1080p 16 is enough? Could be the case according to the recommendations on store page.

[KitchenerꙮLeslie]

I've got 3600mhz 32gb ram and lots of stuttering, so that's not it
The problem is bad optimization, not your hardware

[8BitTimeTraveler]

If there is memory leak, memleak need to be fixed, RAM size need not to be increased.

[Il nome della Rosa]

Thank you for your detailed replies, I'm glad I'm not alone having issues since I'm really interested in playing this, I feel like they should increase the RAM requirements a little bit if that's the main cause of issues, that way I would have upgraded my rig a bit before buying the game, but since I didn't make my own researches first I can't really complain, I'll wait until RAM sticks become a bit more affordable here in Italy and then I'll upgrade.

[IrishUnicorn]

Might be slow ram, 16gb is enough for ultra 1080p, but I've got pretty fast ones at 3600mhz.

[Il nome della Rosa]

Originally posted by Kitchener Leslie:

I've got 3600mhz 32gb ram and lots of stuttering, so that's not it
The problem is bad optimization, not your hardware

I started to doubt that when I saw the game using the SSD, since it had never happened for any other game.

[IrishUnicorn]

It's hard to pinpoint, really, this game optimisation is such a whack that thousands of people got problems even if their specs exceed recomended by far. Most commonly its either slow ram or not enough of it(16gb for 1440p is probably not enough, but I am playing on 1080p so dunno), low vram, slow ssd, might also be not enough cores on cpu, but honestly cpus these days are better quality than gpus so it is hard to be bottlenecked by one, unless it is good several generations behind.

[biosmonkey]

Why do you think your SSD is slow? What kind is it?

I had a similar problem (although my issue had much more severe FPS drops) but that was completely fixed when moving my pagefile to an SSD.

I do still see drops to 60 or so from 100 when in Hogsmeade. I do not consider that to be entirely abnormal given my settings/resolution.

Drops to 40, along with significant disk activity sounds a little suspect though.

If you are already 100% sure that all of the following are true:

* your pagefile is on an SSD or m.2
* there are NO other pagefiles sitting on an HDD (each drive can have one)
* you know your pagefile drive has at least 24GB free (for 16gb ram)

I am not sure what would still be causing this.

Could you take a look at your pagefile config and reply?

1) Run -> type "advanced system"
2) View Advanced System Settings
3) Advanced tab
4) Performance group: Settings... button
5) Advanced tab
6) Virtual Memory group: Change... button

and look at the table for all drives.

Some people are setting custom sizes but I don't recommend that unless you really know what you're doing. Just let the pagefile drive be System Managed size.

Mine is sitting at 16GB virtual mem currently allocated (and I have 16GB of RAM) so the rule of 1.5x physical memory is true.


https://steamcommunity.com/app/990080/discussions/0/3761104682794445877/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HarryPotterGame/comments/1118guv/check_your_pagefile_config_or_how_i_fixed_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[DrumsOfLiberation]

for stuttering yeah probably.
but the massive drops come from DX12 > it loves to eat more VRAM than your card has.
they need to fix that at avalanche