Question about Game Performance

[The Onyx Tiger]

TL;DR

Is it possible that a game's performance can worsen the longer it's open? For example, 10+ hours.

Is it related to your memory and some kind of cache needing to be emptied? I found restarting the game in question always solved the issue, thus me drawing this conclusion.

Post

Sometimes I play the same game for hours at a time and on some games I notice that the performance begins to progressively get worse. Slowly, but eventually noticeable.

I decided to try restarting the game when it first happened years ago and the issue was solved. It would continuously happen with the same game and restarting always worked, so whenever it happened with other games I would simply restart the game and it ran better.

I attributed the issue having something to do with some kind of memory cache overflowing and it causing the game to slow down and lag/stutter. I don't know anything about the guts of a PC or how computers work internally, only how to use them and troubleshoot.

I wanted to know if what I described above is correct. If not, an explanation of what happens to cause a game's performance to worsen the longer it runs would be nice. It doesn't happen a lot or often, but it does happen.

I don't believe it to be my hardware because it has happened with various games across various systems (PCs, PS3(?), and PS4) over several years.

[rawWwRrr]

Some games may suffer performance the longer they are played.

What you describe is what we refer to as a memory leak. Instead of releasing memory back to the system that is no longer needed, the program just allocates more. Over a long enough timeline, the program will consume every available byte locking up the computer.

It's a bug in many applications, not solely a game related one. It rarely appears these days but is still possible given the right circumstances.

[The Onyx Tiger]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Thank you for the swift reply!

I'm playing an older game from 2017 and I believe some other games were somewhat oldies too. I believe the one I keep thinking of that happened the most was turn based, but I could be very wrong. Turns would take significantly longer to process the longer the game ran.