Can you limit the amount of memory Unreal consumes?

I’m pretty new to using Unreal Engine and I noticed that the engine is consuming a lot more memory than I thought it normally does. I have 32GB of memory and when I loaded up a blank project it was consuming about 16GB of ram without adding anything in. I was wondering if there is a way to reduce the amount of memory the engine needs?

I currently have on my PC:
NVIDIA GTX 1650
32 GB RAM
Ryzen 5 3600

I’m also not sure if maybe I have some setting turned on that sets the engine to always use the maximum possible texture quality because I keep getting the “video memory exhausted” error as well.

Any help is appreciated thanks!

Why would you want to do it? Unused memory is wasted memory.

a blank project it was consuming about 16GB of ram without adding anything in.

The more RAM you have, the more the OS (not necessarily UE) will assign to provide the best performance available. You could still run UE5 with 8GB RAM - it’s just not as fun…


I keep getting the “video memory exhausted” error as well.

That’s vRAM - not system RAM. Isn’t the GPU a 4GB unit? These days it’s somewhat hard to develop without 8GB - and even that will sometimes bottleneck. Folks often trade compute power for vRAM. 16GB cards are the go to were you to consider buying a new one today.

Look into:

Okay I will look into this, thank you! I am getting a new card very soon and it will have 8GB of vRAM so I should be good hopefully.