TL;DR: Game literally doesn’t fit into 16gb RAM, with Windows “Memory Compression” (MC) and swap (pagefile) both being disabled.
In other words: Game literally runs on systems with 8gb/16gb ram just because windows helps it to run.
Long: Currently, this Unity game wants to allocate ~14gb peak private memory set on Windows systems with peak working set of ~10gb. That is not possible without swap.
How currently game runs on PC’s with 16gb of ram:
without swap: it crashes, windows can’t allocate all private bytes memory it needs.
with 1gb swap and MC enabled: not enough, it crashes.
with 2gb swap and MC enabled: it plays but crashes after loading different zones in story.
with 8gb swap and MC enabled: plays fine, windows compressing around ~6gb of game memory into ~2gb freeing 4gb memory.
with 8gb swap and MC disabled: plays fine, windows doesn’t compress memory but instead just doing swap write/reads.
On PC’s with 8gb of ram:
only with swap 12+gb and MC enabled: it plays fine/okayish (only micro-freezes on swap memory read). It is always doing huge swap write/reads. It literally fills an entire swap pagefile with Unity assets being loaded into memory from the start.
Without huge swap it crashes.
While I’m okay with 8gb minimum system requirements (according to yours steam shop page), it is barely runnable. I disagree with 16gb being “recommended” it should be at least 24/32gb RAM for PC’s with swap/MC disabled. Yep, we in that era where Unity games require 32gb of RAM just to start without getting help by windows swap.
I suggest you guys to update PC’s requirement on steam page and include swap sizes notes required to run: for 8gb ram its 16gb swap, and for 16gb ram its 8gb swap.
That’s weird 'cause windows is saying that LE is only using ~5.5 gig, unless everything else (discord, a few browser tabs plus all the #### that windows “needs” for itself) is using a whole bunch of ram (which I assume is probably the case).
Firstly, thanks for the detailed post. Can you please elaborate on how to do that? I’m having issues running the game and I’ve tried everything. I wanna try this too, but I don’t know exactly how to.
LE is never 5.5gb. Its task manager trap. It can drop to 3.5gb if you keep farming the same zone over and over. But that’s a fake number, because the rest of game memory is literally compressed by Windows. LE memory usage is around 9gb from the start. And growing to around 12gb after few hours.
Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/RU1fWvm.png and this: https://i.imgur.com/nXFzhDT.png and this https://i.imgur.com/cY0lagT.png (thats from task manger → performance tab → memory) on last image it is basically saying that windows compressed 6276mb of memory into 2821mb freeing 3455mb. All that 6276mb compressed memory its basically LE least used memory pages. Combine that 6276 with 6690 from second image you will get real LE memory usage: 12966mb.
And “Page Faults” number on first image means that game tried to read memory from RAM but cannot find it, and instead it was found into compressed memory or into swap (pagefile).
I also should point that when LE runs into 18gb “private set” bytes then windows “system settings” app keeps crashing…
Press Start or win+R and type SystemPropertiesAdvanced or sysdm.cpl to get into System Properties.
Then on the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
Again click on Advanced tab, and then, under Virtual memory, click Change
Uncheck the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box
Select Drive C: (that’s probably partition with Windows on your SSD or NVMe)
Click Custom size, and type let’s say 8192 or 12288 for both Initial and Maximum size (MB)
Click Set, and then Ok, if windows asks about reboot then reboot.
