Guild Wars 2

To put it bluntly, 64 bit launcher alone takes about 280-320mb of ram.
During game-play it takes every last bit of ram it can take as far as I can tell. I’m getting a little performance boost (5fps on an average) after startup, but in time it is lost as ram usage jumps from ~2-3GB (that I usually get on 32 bit) to 5GB+ on 64 bit client.

By the way it also produces a long-lasting lag. What I mean by that is the game will run fine, but closing or alt-tabbing out will lead lags that slow down the whole PC for ~5-30 seconds. Basically after switching out from gw2 client PC becomes unusable for a period of time.

In case someone’s curious I’m not playing with ultra settings and I’m playing on:
CPU: Intel i7-3630QM at 2.4GHz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 660m
OS: Win 7 (x64)

It’s a 64-bit application. Of course it uses more RAM.

No lag here with 64 bit client. If your machine can’t handle it – go back to the 32 bit client.

The reason for the 64-bit client is that it not crashes at 3.5 gb because it can
in theory use up to 8 TB of ram .. and not that it uses less ram.

And ofc if you play on ultra it will eat maybe all your memory at some point and
windows starts swapping memory to your HDD., and thats maybe the lag you mean.

So .. buy more ram if you absolutely want to play on mega-hyper-ultra, or play on
lower settings. Or restart your client now and then when it consumes to much
memory. I remember i had that in Lineage 2 years ago until i upgraded from
2 to 3 GB at that time

That is the purpose of the 64-bit app, to be able to access more memory so the current OOM error from a swiss cheesed heap could be avoided for longer than the 32-bit app. Of course now if you don’t have enough physical memory, the virtual memory swap file may get you.

I think this ram usage is just memory/resources that don’t get deallocated on time. I am just reporting it as a problem, it’s up to Anet to decide if it’s a valid problem or in fact an expected behavior. Also, If you are going to dismiss it, at least give some reasoning that’s not a paraphrased quote of the FAQ.

Having access to more memory doesn’t automatically double memory usage (although it does double size of pointers in the program)

I guess I’ll point out why I think it’s more of a bug, than normal 64 kittenaracteristic:
-launcher takes ~300mb, I’m sorry, but this alone is a point worth investigating. I have never seen a splash screen that uses 300mb.
-I believe I already mentioned I’m not running any high settings (That means textures are not the biggest ones and processing power required isn’t very high).
-The actual game goes up to 6gb. Again, I’m not playing on ultra HD and as far as I remember few other games ever went past 4gb.
-I never once crashed on 32bit nor 64bit clients and I’ve played lots. Seeing how people cried about how they crashed when someone on another map farted I think it’s safe to assume the amount of memory I have is enough to use with my settings and PC.

My opinion is as it is, because it is not “normal” for an application to jump from 2-3 to 5-6gb on identical settings, just because it switched to 64 bit, unless it actually uses all that memory. In other words unless assets and logic of a single HoT map take up 5-6GB the memory consumption shouldn’t be that high.

Do the math: the game data file was ~20gb (lots of which is graphical data, which bypasses ram completely as far as I know) , and before expansion the game was stable at 1-2gb memory usage. Now the file is 25gb, in other words 5gb larger, which means the assets for the 4 maps (Among other things) can only take up to 5gb. Let’s say 1.25gb / map. If I was playing with part of 1 Tyria map AND a full HoT map at peak ram usage should be ~3.3gb. Even if half of the expansion was loaded loaded at the same time (which should never happen) the ram usage should peak at old RAM usage +2.5gb (4.5gb). But it never stops there.

Basically what I’m trying to say, I think 64bit new client uses the new memory reserve, but only deallocates it when it is filled.

Jitsuryoku.9038:

I think this ram usage is just memory/resources that don’t get deallocated on time. I am just reporting it as a problem, it’s up to Anet to decide if it’s a valid problem or in fact an expected behavior. Also, If you are going to dismiss it, at least give some reasoning that’s not a paraphrased quote of the FAQ.

Having access to more memory doesn’t automatically double memory usage (although it does double size of pointers in the program)

I guess I’ll point out why I think it’s more of a bug, than normal 64 kittenaracteristic:
-launcher takes ~300mb, I’m sorry, but this alone is a point worth investigating. I have never seen a splash screen that uses 300mb.
-I believe I already mentioned I’m not running any high settings (That means textures are not the biggest ones and processing power required isn’t very high).
-The actual game goes up to 6gb. Again, I’m not playing on ultra HD and as far as I remember few other games ever went past 4gb.
-I never once crashed on 32bit nor 64bit clients and I’ve played lots. Seeing how people cried about how they crashed when someone on another map farted I think it’s safe to assume the amount of memory I have is enough to use with my settings and PC.

My opinion is as it is, because it is not “normal” for an application to jump from 2-3 to 5-6gb on identical settings, just because it switched to 64 bit, unless it actually uses all that memory. In other words unless assets and logic of a single HoT map take up 5-6GB the memory consumption shouldn’t be that high.

Do the math: the game data file was ~20gb (lots of which is graphical data, which bypasses ram completely as far as I know) , and before expansion the game was stable at 1-2gb memory usage. Now the file is 25gb, in other words 5gb larger, which means the assets for the 4 maps (Among other things) can only take up to 5gb. Let’s say 1.25gb / map. If I was playing with part of 1 Tyria map AND a full HoT map at peak ram usage should be ~3.3gb. Even if half of the expansion was loaded loaded at the same time (which should never happen) the ram usage should peak at old RAM usage +2.5gb (4.5gb). But it never stops there.

Basically what I’m trying to say, I think 64bit new client uses the new memory reserve, but only deallocates it when it is filled.

Again, comparisons of memory usage between 32 and 64 bit applications are difficult to make. Look at it this way:

If GW2 32-bit was using 3.5gb of memory (can’t use all 4gb because some is reserved for the 32 bit Windows libraries) and swapping to disk then getting OOM crashes, it was using 100% of available memory. If GW2 64 bit is using 5-6gb of memory on a system that has more than 4gb RAM, it isn’t using 100% of available memory.

Now to get really technical, just google the subject. There’s more reasons than just the pointers. Architecture plays a big role too.

You probably have the settings cranked up & fullscreen.

Anyhow, the reason is likely because it is swapping less from the swap file. When you alt-tab it is basically put it as a background process and has to re-render desktop.

Try windowed mode if you need to alt-tab often.

i just ran the laucher to check that out and on my machine it uses 47 % of my CPU and in between 130 000 k and 180 000 k of memory.
i guess what looks like a splash screen is the actual game client (otherwise it’s waaaay too much resource usage).

Jitsuryoku.9038:

I think this ram usage is just memory/resources that don’t get deallocated on time. I am just reporting it as a problem, it’s up to Anet to decide if it’s a valid problem or in fact an expected behavior. Also, If you are going to dismiss it, at least give some reasoning that’s not a paraphrased quote of the FAQ.

The longer you play the more memory is used just because of memory fragmentation,
thats a “normal” problem with how C++ works.

For all the folks that are not able to just set some settings down it was normal
to crash after a while so the memory was cleaned up .. with 64-bit there is no
crash so you experience what we hat had 10 years ago when we had a max of
1-2 GB memory with 32-Bit Windows → usage of the swap file.

Of course maybe not so many did ever experience that since at that time a lot
people refused to use 32-bit and wanted everything to run still with Win9x.

However .. if you don’t want swapping now, there is still the option for lower
settings, restarting the client now and then .. or buy 32+ GB of RAM.

I think most people here misses the simple point that OP is making: GW2 does not seem to free up memory very well. Having 8GB of RAM available just makes the game uses almost all of that with the 64bit client. And I am not using extreme high settings. It doesn’t crash the game for me, the 32 bit client didn’t either. My OS seems to manage memory allocation fine. But it makes me wonder if the GW2 ever free up memory.

Throwing more memory at the problem will solve some crashes (great for some players). But I would rather see the game free up memory when I swap maps. But maybe the engine isn’t capable of that. If so I fear for all the players that have OOMs at the moment.

Restarting the client every few hours will also solve OOM issues. But I have not seen this simple solution mentioned by a dev. Maybe because they don’t see it as a valid option? Hopefully they will find a solution for the memory hunger of GW2.

Rose Solane.1027:

I think most people here misses the simple point that OP is making: GW2 does not seem to free up memory very well. Having 8GB of RAM available just makes the game uses almost all of that with the 64bit client. And I am not using extreme high settings. It doesn’t crash the game for me, the 32 bit client didn’t either. My OS seems to manage memory allocation fine. But it makes me wonder if the GW2 ever free up memory.

Throwing more memory at the problem will solve some crashes (great for some players). But I would rather see the game free up memory when I swap maps. But maybe the engine isn’t capable of that. If so I fear for all the players that have OOMs at the moment.

Restarting the client every few hours will also solve OOM issues. But I have not seen this simple solution mentioned by a dev. Maybe because they don’t see it as a valid option? Hopefully they will find a solution for the memory hunger of GW2.

I don’t miss the point .. read this if you don’t know what memory fragmentation is :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3770457/what-is-memory-fragmentation

Rose Solane.1027:

I think most people here misses the simple point that OP is making: GW2 does not seem to free up memory very well. Having 8GB of RAM available just makes the game uses almost all of that with the 64bit client. And I am not using extreme high settings. It doesn’t crash the game for me, the 32 bit client didn’t either. My OS seems to manage memory allocation fine. But it makes me wonder if the GW2 ever free up memory.

Throwing more memory at the problem will solve some crashes (great for some players). But I would rather see the game free up memory when I swap maps. But maybe the engine isn’t capable of that. If so I fear for all the players that have OOMs at the moment.

Restarting the client every few hours will also solve OOM issues. But I have not seen this simple solution mentioned by a dev. Maybe because they don’t see it as a valid option? Hopefully they will find a solution for the memory hunger of GW2.

When a program starts up, the memory heap starts small. When an allocation fails because there isn’t a block of memory large enough the nuts and bolts of the allocation code asks the OS for more memory, gets a much larger chunk than necessary and that then gets added to the heap. Now OOM occurs when the OS says, nope, no more memory for you, go home.

Now this appending additional memory to the heap well grow the size of the heap, hopefully reaching a point where the program stops annoying the OS for more memory. But what it doesn’t do is release that memory back to the OS when it’s not being used, at least not quickly or frequently. Now because of the various aspects of virtual memory, this isn’t actually physical memory being reserved for this program but an address range the program can reference. The actual amount of physical memory being used it controlled by the OS which tries to keep only the memory that is constantly being used by the program which can be much smaller than the amount allocated. This is called the working set. Program memory that isn’t in the working set can still be in physical memory, it’s just tagged as something that if physical memory needs for the system becomes an issue, it can be swapped out.

For instance, as I’m writing this my character is standing at the TP in DR after playing for a bit. Looking at it’s memory usage in Process Explorer my peak amount of memory allocated by the OS to GW2-64 is about 4.88 GB. Of that my peak working set was around 2.96 GB and as I’m standing here my working set is currently around 859 MB.

i agree with Rose Solane.
And obviously, making words bold is pointless for most people.

Winderly.2718:

i agree with Rose Solane.
And obviously, making words bold is pointless for most people.

ross solane’s point is basically saying gw2 uses lots of memory. I am mad that it does not use only 3.2 GB ram.

His point is kinda far remove from the reality is that mmorpg are massive games and require more ram than average.

He/she also suggested that the Devs never posted the information that one can restart their computer periodically, to clear out memory. This is not so, it’s been posted several times.

Beldin.5498:

Jitsuryoku.9038:

I think this ram usage is just memory/resources that don’t get deallocated on time. I am just reporting it as a problem, it’s up to Anet to decide if it’s a valid problem or in fact an expected behavior. Also, If you are going to dismiss it, at least give some reasoning that’s not a paraphrased quote of the FAQ.

The longer you play the more memory is used just because of memory fragmentation,
thats a “normal” problem with how C++ works.

For all the folks that are not able to just set some settings down it was normal
to crash after a while so the memory was cleaned up .. with 64-bit there is no
crash so you experience what we hat had 10 years ago when we had a max of
1-2 GB memory with 32-Bit Windows -> usage of the swap file.

Of course maybe not so many did ever experience that since at that time a lot
people refused to use 32-bit and wanted everything to run still with Win9x.

However .. if you don’t want swapping now, there is still the option for lower
settings, restarting the client now and then .. or buy 32+ GB of RAM.

Why on earth do you need 32GB of RAM to run GW2?
Or anything gaming related for that matter.
The 64 bit client goes up to 6-7 Gigs with everything set to max.

Jitsuryoku.9038:

To put it bluntly, 64 bit launcher alone takes about 280-320mb of ram.
During game-play it takes every last bit of ram it can take as far as I can tell. I’m getting a little performance boost (5fps on an average) after startup, but in time it is lost as ram usage jumps from ~2-3GB (that I usually get on 32 bit) to 5GB+ on 64 bit client.

By the way it also produces a long-lasting lag. What I mean by that is the game will run fine, but closing or alt-tabbing out will lead lags that slow down the whole PC for ~5-30 seconds. Basically after switching out from gw2 client PC becomes unusable for a period of time.

In case someone’s curious I’m not playing with ultra settings and I’m playing on:
CPU: Intel i7-3630QM at 2.4GHz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 660m
OS: Win 7 (x64)

Get another 8 gigs of ram,up to a total of 16 and you’ll be fine.
What happens when you are Alt Tabing is that the OS stops
giving the game priority in RAM usage and unloads the game
from the RAM to the Hard Drive,in order to make room
for any other program you want to run,and that slows down your PC.
It’s the interactions between the physical RAM and the virtual memory
on the hard drive that causes the ‘lag’.

woow, guys what’s hard to understand in :
- launcher alone takes about 280-320mb of ram
- every last bit of ram it can take
It’s in bold letters for a reason.

You’re so off the first post it makes me wonder if you actually have read it.

Well i’m off this topic. There’s no point talking to deaf people (or typing with blind people in current case).

Winderly.2718:

woow, guys what’s hard to understand in :
- launcher alone takes about 280-320mb of ram

So? It’s a 64 bit executable. There’s nothing really difficult to understand here. Go run Windows 3.1 for lower memory usage. I better stop before I get any more facetious here.

I find it works brilliantly I haven’t had 1 game crash since I started using it and have noticed any were from 40 to 300% fps increases I ,m loving it but yes it uses more memory what would be the point of using 64 bits anything if you didn’t allow it to use more then 3.5. That’s the whole point of moving away from 32 bit operating systems anyways is the limits of ram useage More multitasking faster programs and games . You may be having other issues see what’s running in the background because I’ve only got 6 GB of system memory installed and using the 64 bit beta client has solved so many issues for me asfaik its the best thing anet has done to the game besides developing it

I’ve never heard of somebody complaining about memory usage, didn’t we buy it to make use of it.

Winderly.2718:

woow, guys what’s hard to understand in :
- launcher alone takes about 280-320mb of ram
- every last bit of ram it can take
It’s in bold letters for a reason.

You’re so off the first post it makes me wonder if you actually have read it.

Well i’m off this topic. There’s no point talking to deaf people (or typing with blind people in current case).

It’s not just the launcher, it’s the game engine as well.

The 32-bit version uses 230 megs while idling at the login screen, versus 322 megs on the 64-bit version. What bugs me more is “idle” is chewing up 14% of my CPU with either version. As for size difference, all memory pointers in the code and data are now twice as large. It’s also likely that memory objects are 64-bit aligned rather than 32-bit which chews up the heap faster but since a 64-bit app can use 8 TB vs 4 GB, that growth is immaterial in the big scheme of things.

It’s size is likely due to the fact it loaded up indexes to all the assets in the dat files, remember all those 100,000s of files that are downloaded when you are installing or there’s a very large patch, each is an individual or group of assets.

The whole idea of the 64-bit client is that it can utilize more memory than a 32 bit application, depending on the way the application is designed utilizing more memory can result in less crashing of the client and possibly better loading times in maps.

My personal experience with the x64 client is that I have almost no game crashes anymore. On the 32 bit client i had game crashes very regularly in the new HoT maps. I have 32GB of RAM in my system so I am very happy that Anet created the x64 client! if you ask me, i wish that there was an option to set the client to use even more memory so loading between maps would even go faster (maybe?) but the x64 client alone mas helped a lot for me