UE4 Too much RAM use

Hello so lately I noticed that Windows 10 kept informing me that I was running out of RAM and I have to close applications
to release more Memory Leeway etc…

This is something I hardly noticed with the UE4 in the past the level that I test out with the Engine has never had RAM related
issues and it has never hogged so much the content in my game is efficient and fast when it comes to loading it to memory.

Is this a engine issue? is the current version more RAM intensive?

UE4 4.16.1
Windows 10 8GB DDR3 RAM

Not that I’ve noticed but 8gigs of ram on a development box is a bit on the light side.

Up that to at least 16, or better still 32, and life will be good once again.

Even my old rig on 16 was a little painful (4.10+). I jumped to 24GB on a “dont feel like spending a ton on RAM right now” decision and it helped a little.
New dev machine is a Ryzen 1800xt with DDR4 PC3200 @ 64GB and it grants wishes.

No I’m sure there might be something up with the engine, I was optimizing my game to use much less RAM and the use of the RAM on the Unreal Engine 4 just randomly escalated.

What I’m saying is is it normal for it to just randomly use more RAM despite there being much less on that level? I mostly see it using at around 3GB of RAM and out of no where it
grabs another 1GB and some change along with it and like I said I was doing optimization and that also ment to cut down on things like Fog /aliasing etc… from being drawn on the
editor unless its the game and the memory still increases.

You need more RAM than 8Gb. My project can take up to 16Gb. Cutting down on graphics won’t help you, those features are using the memory on your GPU. A lot of RAM are using things that need to be loaded into memory from your hard drive for fast access at runtime, for example your meshes. If you have baked lighting generated textures get loaded into memory and can take some space. RAM usage can go up randomly because UE4 keeps track of things that need to be saved, save your project and RAM usage should go down a bit. Also clean your log window, this one is weird but it does help.

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In 4.16, I have noticed much higher ram usage…

I have a fairly large project with alot of assets - not sure if that is related.

RAM is very cheap nowadays… engineer time is a lot more expensive. 16GB should be the minimum to get things going smoothly… I have 16GB on notebook, and never have any issues with RAM… there was one or two times where RAM usage approached 90%, but then I closed and restarted UE4 Editor, and everything was good.

On my machine it takes ages for the editor to reboot If you have a crash, it takes ages also for the BSP to insert into the level (I have to build in BSP in the level for some of my buildings because I don’t know alot on 3d modeling so I have to build them with BSP before I can texture them and turn them into static meshes. Because you can convert them in the engine from BSP… I have 16 GB ram and been still having Crashing issues going on with Ver 4.15 with The Geforce 810a Video Card in my machine… I don’t think that card is supported in 4.15… It will run in 4.14 but There’s also another card called PC Graphics Adaptor (had to disable that in order to access the Geforce Video Card).

So the engine will run with Geforce but not run very well… I can’t put alot of stuff in the level as a result or the engine runs into stalling frame rates.

64GB PC3200 and i may hit 10% total use, even when playing from PIE
70GB total project size (not a cleaned up directory setup so lots of unused assets in there)

The Geforece 810a is a disaster of a card.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+810A

i wouldnt use that at all.
its a 1GB card, doesnt support … anything at all …
DDR3
It’s really bad. Isnt even on the market anymore. Time for an update to that video card.
“We recommend the NVIDIA GeForce 810A for gaming with highest details at resolutions up to, and including, 1024x768.”
The more i read about this, omg, haha.

Bro if you live in the US, I have a couple extra video cards laying around …

You need at least a GTX 970 or a GTX 1060 (better 1070) to work with UE4 … anything slower is a pain and should be avoided for anyone that wants to make any game that is not very low poly.

I agree, but, would drop that down to a 700 series Ti may be “lowest”. With the cost of the 900 series tho, 900 would be the best bet here (970+ as stated would be min 900 series)

A better graphics card might solve one issue, but I think I need a NEW MACHINE. The Game I’m making however not a small little game. But this machine can’t handle building a big game very well in its editor. I think its only got a multicore Intel processor. 16 gig ram, and 2 tb hdd.

On my machine if I’m running another program as well as Unreal Engine, when Unreal Engine
is throwing out memory threads when building the map it starts soon slowing down the system speeds and causing operating system stalling issues which bring unreal engine as well as the op down to a crawl… What I think I probably need is a 8-16 core machine for handling all the tasks in
Unreal Engine. To stop all these slowdowns.

The machine I have is just not powerful enough to handle all the tasks of the game
that I’m building.

And there’s also the dilemna of also too many sections of code piling up
in the Third Person Blueprint as well.

If you can afford it go for a Core i7 or Core i9 6-core at least, 32GB DDR4 Quad-Channel RAM, X299 motherboard. Get a good SSD like the Sandisk ones 240GB+ for OS boot and a 2TB+ HDU. If you want to add RAID protection and speed you would need to buy multiple HDUs and/or SSDs for RAID-5 or RAID-6 config. You could buy an Adaptec SAS RAID Series 7 controller that has hardware ROC RAID-5, RAID-50, RAID-6, RAID-60 used and fully working on eBay at a cheap price then. A GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 GPU. A good tower case with plenty of 90mm and/or 120mm silent fans. And a good 80+ Gold or Platinum PSU 750Watt+ like the Seasonic , Antec (Delta Electronics models) , SuperFlower ones.

Well I’m afraid there is some danger there, I reviewed the computer I own and I can not expand the RAM any further it says the limit is 8GB and the GPU has 2GB of RAM I wasn’t
paying attention to the machine I bought which is a Lenovo I just bought it and walked away it came with 4GB but I later expanded it to 8GB.

I’m good at making efficient 3D content and when I look at the level through Shader Complexity everything is green and good nothing is slowing it down not even the textures the only thing that
does go to the pinkish and white is the grass but the grass LOD I readjusted to appear much closer than further.

I continued the optimization and the game feels much more lighter for sure and when I saw the amount of RAM the UE4 was using “around 4,100 MB” I played it a bit afraid
that the engine would crash but surprisingly the game played and the error pop up that warned me about low RAM did not appear.

Further more I looked and it turns out that UE4 does not measure the same as Task Manager when I load the engine first time use on the Task Manager it reads 3,106.4MB
but on the engine it reads 3,288.56MB, the last time when I saw the engine using 4GB was much lower on the task manager.

The game uses no more than 2,900MB but if anything its always been a 3GB game as far as to I can remember and the RAM was never a issue I even remember running things like
Microsoft Edge with multiple tabs and music on the background while the editor was open.

I don’t know whats up but maybe the newer ones use more RAM? that to me is what might be going on I’m not 100 on it but nothing has changed with the PC everything is using
as little RAM as possible and the game like I said is the same and when I used it on other older versions none of them gave me this issue despite it being more RAM hungry than
how it is now.

The build should fall into your budget, just know, your looking at spending at least 1k on something that will carry you. I dropped 5k and my computer takes a nap while i develop.
The RyZen series beats intel in multi-threading processing. RyZen will do more for you in development then the Intel side will, and, save you a ton of money (about half the cost total). Intel only beats the RyZen on SINGLE CORE performance. IE: Games. (read: gaming, not developing games)
NVidias CUDA will help out over AMD/ATI video cards, but, cost a bit more there. I have no thing BAD to say about AMD/ATI cards, just, in this application, you will perform better with an NVidia due to CUDA cores.
RAM should be at least 32GB. DDR3 isok, but, i would toss in some 4 for the performance.
SSD is 100% personal pref. I have my OS and other MS software on a EVO 2T M.2 drive … all my dev work is done from my 4TB Barracuda SATA drive. No performance boost, that i have noticed, from having it all on a SSD. Now, remember SSD has limited I/O so when your SSD goes, you lost 100% of everything without the option to recover any of it. Hence why i don’t use for my DEV work.
I recommend the ASRock Taichi if you are going the RyZen rout.

*note: UE4 doesnt use SLi or Crossfire so make sure you get 1 good card, not 2 janky ones.

In the end, its up to you and what you want to spend.
This summer: Threadripper. 16 core 32 thread AMD CPU.
year of our lord and savior 2018: Unknown Name Video by AMD; quad GPU video cards.

So depends how long you want to wait … threadripper will cause prices to fall on the RyZens, but, Ryzen 1700 is a very good choice for the cost.

^ all this is 100% based on the last few months of research and posts/threads in the UE4 forums. Benchmarks and “cost per performance” break downs.

Cant expand further I’m stuck with 8GB I wasn’t paying attention to the computer I bought I technically have 10GB that one dough is only 2GB that i just have sitting there doing nothing but because
my Motherboard only has 2 available slots and they are all taken by 4GB Ram modules.

If you have 2 slots it should support up to 16Gb (If it is a newer motherboard).

Well I will give it a shot one day, at the moment I’m still trying to optimize where possible, the computer I bought it in 2013 maybe it will do justice.

This only gets worse, so after multiple attempts to optimize the game the engine still consumes even more RAM I was doing some tests with the game in the engine and now I get a warning about low VRAM also my GPU is new and is
using GDDR5 RAM versus the old one with DDR3 RAM?

Even dough I have been doing nothing but optimizations left and right the thing just loves to eat RAM and now the VRAM, This was the one part where I said I had enough when I was in the blue prints setting up
a jump sound effect for my character I saved the final result and what happened was truly insane… the alert pop up sound was playing and then the screen went black… I wasn’t able to get the computer to do anything
and nothing worked leading to a hard shutdown of my computer.

This is just discouraging for future games made with that engine in full honesty, I’m not bashing on the engine or anything I just had enough with the RAM and I could swarn in the past versions of UE4 none of these things happened even dough that one level is very close to identical in design.

I’m looking towards the Cryengine 5 now and the requirements are much more friendlier RAM min and req “4GB to 8GB” than Unreals.

8 GB is surely low . Provided you are running UE4 , you’ll also have background processes running too . Sometimes I have observed that during windows update , the disk usage becomes 100% . Have a look if that is the cause . If so force stop the process . But , 8 GB is low .